by Linda Yamamoto

The PAM Publisher Liaisons (aka Publisher Relations) Committee met on Tuesday, June 14th, at 3:35-4:55pm in the Division Suite. About 20 people were in attendance. Unfortunately, Jane Kinkus Yatcilla moved to another position and division in January, so Linda Yamamoto took her place as Chair.

Publisher Liaison Reports:

AAS (Molly White): See Molly’s full report (with correction) sent out to PAMnet on 7/21/11. The Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society (BAAS) is now online only and freely available. Subscription prices for 2012 have been set, and increases will be minimal, around 2%. In 2013 print costs will be shifted to print subscribers, which could be difficult for those institutions that still require print.

Turpion (Thurston Miller): IOP has 10 years of Turpion journal archives on their platform and the full archive back to volume 1, issue 1 resides on the Turpion platform.

INSPEC (Rich Hunt): has added its 12 millionth record. Inspec is adding citation information to their records, first on their platform then on other systems. Web of Science is not on board with adding citation information in their version of Inspec. They are also adding IPC (International Patent Classification) codes to records.

SPIE (Linda Yamamoto): The SPIE eBooks package has been launched on their Digital Library platform. At least one institution finds the eBooks package too expensive.

SIAM (David Marshall, SIAM) is now participating in CLOCKSS and Portico.

IAU Working Group on Libraries (Marsha Bishop): the group will meet at the IAU General Assembly meeting in Beijing at the end of August 2012.

IAU Commission 5 Working Group Libraries will host a bridge program at the IAU General Assembly in Beijing in August 2012.  The two-part program will consist of a panel discussion between scientists and Librarians on the topic “The Need for Libraries, Even in the Age of the Internet” followed by a second segment devoted to shared library-operated projects and programs between observatories.  We are presently working to raise funds to help defray the cost of travel for librarians to the IAU General Assembly Commission 5 Working Group Libraries program in Beijing.  If you are interested in participating in this conference or would like more information, please contact Marsha Bishop at mbishop@nrao.edu.

Mathematical Sciences Publishers (MSP) (Carol Hutchins for Martha Tucker): There have been changes in personnel at MSP. Carol Hutchins is on the Board of Directors along with Steve Rockey. Celebratio Mathematica, a new open-access scholarly web publication that honors the lives and achievements of scientists, will be published by MSP. Jim Pitman is interested in reducing the publication backlogs.

OSA (Karen Andrews): is showing greater flexibility regarding subscriptions.

Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (ASP) (Marsha Bishop): ASP Conference Proceedings will be archived at ADS. Author publication charges will increase next year. Asking for feedback regarding PASP journal access via University of Chicago Press on JSTOR, which will have 1 year embargo for deposit into institutional repositories.

World Scientific (Stella Ota): no meetings in the past year. Obtaining individual MARC records for ebooks has been slow (unless purchased as a package), although they are of high quality.

Royal Society of Chemistry (Thurston Miller): The RSC Library Advisory Board meets virtually, but they were planning to meet in Philadelphia.

AGU (Flora Grabowska): it’s much easier to switch journal subscriptions to e-only. Unfortunately, the print version is unattractive since it’s printed 2 pages per side in landscape format. Eos is now offered separately from the “AGU All Content” package.

Project Euclid (Steve Rockey): the advisory board is mostly composed of mathematicians. Selected titles must be indexed cover-to-cover. Project Euclid is financially stable; there have been discussions regarding payments to small journals.

Steve also reported that Cornell e-book records will improve, and encouraged editorial boards to follow the IMU Best Current Practices for Journals. It was also mentioned that the Engineering Libraries Division of ASEE still has their ejournal standards online, “Best Practices for Electronic Resources.”

AIP Publications Policy Committee (Thurston Miller): meets in May and December to discuss the economics of publishing; the group is mostly comprised of editors.

Chair report (Linda Yamamoto): This year, we have vacancies with Elsevier, IOP Publishing, ACM, and EDP. The EDP liaison position is difficult to fill because EDP requires that the liaison speak French. Elsevier has not responded to inquiries about appointing a new liaison. Several people made suggestions for possible candidates for these vacancies. NOTE: Linda is still working with Springer on appointing a PAM member on their Library Advisory Group, as the person in charge left Springer since the conference.

Discussion:
It was felt that we need to encourage more participation from the general PAM membership. There was some confusion as to whether or not this was an open meeting, which it was, but this was not made clear on PAMnet.

There was much concern expressed over AIP’s announcement that non-member society journals will no longer be hosted on the Scitation platform in a year or two (for the list of member societies and publishing partners, see http://librarians.scitation.org/librarians/publication_partners.jsp). How will this affect our subscription costs? What about all those resource URLs we have in our catalogs and discovery environments?

There was some discussion regarding the pay-per-view option offered by many publishers. Some find this as unacceptable since you don’t get perpetual access or the ability to maintain it on the library’s platform, assuming that the library has hosting capabilities; perhaps allowing this would improve sales of pay-per-view. If hosting is possible, then articles can be listed in the catalog with some sort of IP authentication. Scribd was mentioned as another possible solution.

Another point of discussion was the effect of Open Access journal costs to non-library budgets — will this be bad for library budgets in the long run? But OA journals can give local research more exposure so it may be worth it when you don’t need to maintain journal subscriptions.

Publishers would appreciate receiving ideas and comments from members funneling through their PAM liaison instead of being surprised by postings on the PAM list.

Finally, concerns were raised about preserving smaller e-journals such as the New York Journal of Mathematics, as Portico and LOCKSS/CLOCKSS already cover most major publishers and their publications.