Vol.6, No.1 (Spring 2006)

Open Access Publishing in Chemistry

Chemistry World, the Royal Society of Chemistry's news magazine, posed the following question for its "Your views..." column in the February 2006 issue 3(2):27 (subscription required):

How should chemists respond to open access publishing?

The respondents (four so far) have made these points:

  • open access presents no real change to standards as long as peer review remains in place
  • commercial publishing of printed chemical journals represent money taken out of the chemistry 'pot'
  • commercial publishers have not passed along the tremendous production cost savings realized through word-processing, email, computer-typesetting, digital digital distribution
  • commercial publishers stand accused of not keeping faith with their customers because subscription costs have increased at a rate far outstripping inflation
  • recovering publication costs in an open access system could be accomplished through a redistribution of existing library budgets -- although there is a concern about whether the requirement to meet publication cost may lead authors to question whether they can afford to publish a particular piece of work (whether the funds come from the author directly or from the author's university, there will likely not be a limitless budget for publishing)
  • there should be concern about archival permanance and vulnerabilities of single servers [my note: this is true of both commercial publications and open access]

(Via Open Access News)

IM Me

I don't know how many of you use IM. I use it on occasion and it occurred to me that it might be an alternative way for people to contact me.

My AIM screen name is "tomkeays". I've put an icon on my library contact page similar to the one in this entry. If I'm online, it will appear. Give it a try.

Potential Chemistry Journal Cancellations

Dear Chemistry Faculty,

We haven't had to do this for a long while (in fact, due to electronic journal packages, we've added much content) but the Library again needs to cancel some journals in order to stay within budget. I am proposing the following list of print journals and one book series. These titles have all been low use items in the past few years. While the journal cancellation is an all-or-nothing decision, I am able to purchase titles from the book series on a case-by-case basis.

Please contact me if you have research or teaching needs that would be hurt by the loss of a given journal title. However, it is unfortunate that I don't have a lot of leeway in this.

My deadline to turn in the final list is May 22, so please respond no later than May 19.

Thank you,

Thomas Keays
htkeays@syr.edu / 443-9769

Journals (CHEMP)

  • Annali di chimica.
  • Biological & pharmaceutical bulletin.
  • Bulletin of the Chemical Society of Japan.
  • Chemical & pharmaceutical bulletin.
  • Chemical market reporter.
  • Chemistry and industry.
  • Chemistry letters.
  • Derwent journal of synthetic methods.
  • Israel journal of chemistry.
  • Journal of AOAC International.
  • Journal of biomolecular structure & dynamics.
  • Journal of physical and chemical reference data.
  • Molecular physics.
  • Organic preparations and procedures international.
  • Synlett.
  • Synthesis.
  • Synthetic communications.

Series (CHEMT)

  • Springer series in optical sciences.

I'll report back with the final list on May 22.

Final Journal Cancellation List

My final cancellation list comprises the following titles.

  • Annali di chimica.
  • Chemical market reporter. (will retain annual microform cumulation)
  • Derwent journal of synthetic methods. (cumulated annually in Theilheimer's synthetic methods of organic chemistry)
  • Journal of AOAC International.
  • Journal of biomolecular structure & dynamics.
  • Journal of physical and chemical reference data.
  • Springer series in optical sciences. (book series, will purchase on title by title basis)

At the request of quite a few people, I will retain the following titles.

  • Bulletin of the Chemical Society of Japan.
  • Chemical & pharmaceutical bulletin.
  • Chemistry and industry.
  • Chemistry letters.
  • Israel journal of chemistry.
  • Molecular physics.
  • Organic preparations and procedures international.
  • Synlett.
  • Synthesis.
  • Synthetic communications.

A process note: I had one faculty request to retain Molecular physics, which I will honor for this coming year. However, because of its very large annual subscription price ($$6,575 in 2005) and because it has been increasing in price by around 10% ever since Taylor and Francis publishers acquired it a couple of years ago, I'm going to be monitoring its usage. I am trying to get the publisher to send me online usage stats for the past few years as a baseline. My impression, based on the Library's SFX usage stats (which is only an indicator, not a total usage picture), is that it does get used a little, but not as much as other physical chemistry journals such as Journal of chemical physics, Journal of physical chemistry, Langmuir, Chemical physics letters, etc.

In the meantime, I'm collecting as much online usage data as I can to help inform future decisions and hope to have a decent system that includes faculty publication data, price, price inflation, cost per use, etc. by next winter. I'll share that data with you in making future decisions of this sort.

Thanks to all of you for your feedback and assistance. It helped make this a much more informed decision.