I believe that we all owe a debt to Peter Brueggeman and his
colleagues at Scripps Institution of Oceanography for their open letter to
Marcia McNutt, AGU President. I hope it initiated a change in thinking at
AGU for the better.
I forwarded the open letter, as well as the response from Jon Sears,
AGU Publisher of Secondary Services, to Pauline Simpson at the Southampton
Oceanographic Centre, to the members of the marine and atmospheric sciences
faculties here at Stony Brook. I asked that they consider this action and
express their concerns to AGU ( indicating their membership, if
appropriate) and their colleagues at other campuses. I also asked that they
voice their opinions here on campus to Marvin Geller, Dean of the Marine
Sciences Research Center. Marv is the current President of the Atmospheric
Sciences Section of AGU. Marv's response to Marcia McNutt follows below.
(Marv authorized me to distribute this, if needed.)
Marv has also spoken to Marcia by phone. He indicated to me that
this issue may be brought up at the next AGU board meeting.
I am asking you to consider contacting the appropriate faculty and /
or AGU members in your respective areas, advising them of the AGU
activities, and enlist their support for a more reasoned move.
Thank you.
RJK
Roger J. Kelly
Head, Marine & Atmospheric Sciences Information Center
165 Challenger Hall
State University of New York at Stony Brook
Stony Brook, New York 11794-5000
tel: (631) 632-8679
fax: (631) 632-2364
e-mail: Roger.Kelly@stonybrook.edu
----- Forwarded by Roger Kelly/Lib on 05/01/2002 09:45 AM -----
Marvin Geller
To: "McNutt, Marcia" <mcnutt@mbari.org>
04/27/2002 05:29 cc: (bcc: Roger Kelly/Lib)
PM Subject: AGU
Marcia,
I'm sure that this is not the first message of this type that you
have received. From all I hear, the Earth Science librarians are getting
increasingly upset with the AGU. It is partly as a consequence of some of
the AGU decisions on publications, but in my opinion it is also a
consequence of their seeing the AGU as being arrogant and making decisions
without consultation of those affected by those decisions. Note the
unfavorable comparisons of the AGU with other societies in this regard. I
think that the AGU leadership MUST engage librarians and members of the
scientific community that publish in and read AGU journals in the course of
their decisionmaking rather than after the fact. I think that this should
be a major item on our Council agenda.
Marv
----- Forwarded by Marvin Geller/MSRC on 04/27/02 05:29 PM -----
Roger Kelly
To: MSRC Faculty
04/26/02 04:01 PM cc: Christian Filstrup/Lib@SUNYSB
Subject: AGU
Ladies and Gentlemen of the MSRC Faculty:
The attachments to this message are aimed toward increasing your awareness
of the current activities of a significant publisher in your areas of
interest, specifically, the American Geophysical Union, more commonly known
as AGU.
Over the past few years, many of you have asked me why the Library does not
carry electronic versions of the varied publications. The Library does
carry quite a number of the print journals. However, despite the
indications from Fred Spilhaus several years ago, when AGU was still trying
to formulate > fair and reasonable institutional pricing = for their
electronic publications, we currently carry none for the simple reason that
we cannot afford to buy them - now or in the foreseeable future.
Now, to make our lives more miserable, especially in terms of any research
effort, or in citing the works of your esteemed colleagues, or in
requesting a paper through a traditional service of the Library, namely
inter-library loan, we find that the organization, in its wisdom, has
deemed it a good time to eliminate page numbering from their publications.
In its place, there is now a twenty digit character string, known lovingly
as a digital object identifier or DOI with which you can now deal.
Since the official record of AGU publications is now electronic rather than
paper, it is something that must be dealt with - and soon. Because of the
length of the string and the foibles of human nature, it is not difficult
to see:
an inter-library loan request failing to return the correct
document;
a reference in a journal article citing a paper in a recent AGU
publication not found due to DOI error;
bibliographic database compiler erring in keying a DOI, effectively
losing the paper.
AGU is by itself at this juncture. No other major publisher in the
scientific or other field has deigned to eliminate page numbers. This
approach, though, is consistent with the stance taken by the organization
in pricing its electronic products for institutions. To make this more
disheartening to a significant number of librarians in the marine and
atmospheric science areas is a comparison with another major organization,
the American Meteorological Society (AMS). Not only do the leaders of this
organization listen to their members, they listen to the librarians
supporting their membership with regard to pricing models, licensing, and
availability. The President, Executive Director , and Director of
Publications attended and spoke at sessions of ASLI (Atmospheric Science
Librarians International) earlier this year. They do it every year. The
contrast between AMS and AGU is unbelievable.
I urge you to read the AGU web pages regarding these changes:
http://www.agu.org/pubs/pubs.html and the open letter to Marcia McNutt, AGU
President. Following that letter is a response to Pauline Simpson, head of
the Southampton Oceanography Centre, from Jon Sears, Publisher of Secondary
Services at AGU. To me, his response is not satisfactory but, rather,
indicates how convoluted this is becoming.
Upon completion of your reading, I would suggest that you speak to Marv
Geller in his role of Section President for the Atmospheric Sciences within
AGU.. Please make your feelings /opinion known to him or to me.
Thank you.
RJK
Attachment 1: Open Letter to Marcia McNutt:
25 April 2002
To: Marcia McNutt, AGU President
From: Ralph Keeling, Jeff Severinghaus, Peter Brueggeman
CC: AGU Executive Committee, AGU Publications Committee
Dear Marcia,
It has recently come to our attention that, in its move towards online
publishing, AGU has done away with sequential page numbering of journal
articles as of January 2002. Instead, AGU is requiring articles to be cited
based on a 20-digit character string (e.g. 10.1029/2001JA001490), known as
a digital object identifier (DOI), and disallowing current scientific
practice wherein articles are cited by volume, issue, and page numbers. The
cited benefits of AGU's new system include the ability to improve online
access, the flexibility to submit videos or other multi-media materials as
part of an article, and the ability to provide electronic links to other
articles or pieces. The impression given by the AGU web page (
http://www.agu.org/pubs/e_publishing/) is that the elimination of
sequential page numbering of journal articles was necessary to provide
these benefits. In a search of current publishing practice, however, we
have come up with a short, admittedly incomplete, list of commercial
publishers and professional societies who continue to use sequential page
numbering of journal articles in their transition to online publishing:
American Meteorological Society, American Chemical Society, American
Fisheries Society, Nature, Science, American Institute of Physics,
Elsevier, Company of Biologists, Royal Society of Chemistry, University of
Chicago Press, Geological Society of America, Kluwer, Springer Verlag,
Cambridge University Press. Many of these consider their ejournal to be the
archival record, and provide active links via an HTML version. We were
unable to find a single example, besides AGU, of a scientific publisher
abandoning sequential page numbering of journal articles in the transition
to online publishing. We also checked with the Director of the Science &
Engineering Library at UCSD, who was also unable to cite any publisher
following AGU practice. Although examples might still be found, it is clear
that AGU's practice is out of step with general trends in online
publishing.
As an emerging industry standard, the DOI clearly fulfills an essential
need in electronic publishing, by providing an alternative to the awkward
practice of referring to (unstable) web addresses. Nevertheless, the way
the DOI is being implemented by AGU, as the unique identifier of scientific
articles for citation purposes, is apparently highly eccentric.
Unfortunately, AGU's decision to eliminate sequential page numbering of
journal articles and to force citations to be based solely on the DOI comes
at a high cost:
(1) The use of the DOI for citations creates problems in
compatibility. It is annoying and troublesome to have two different filing
or organizational systems in use concurrently in science: AGU and everybody
else. It appears that all science ejournal publishers except AGU refer to
their publishable units, the article, by volume, issue, and pagination.
Although the community that commonly cites AGU journals may be able to
adapt, problems will remain for the wider community that doesn't understand
the AGU system and doesn't want to be bothered. Some may assume that AGU
publications are "grey" literature or still "in press", since their
citations look non-standard among scientific publications. It's naive to
assume that AGU's unique system will ever be transparent to the scientific
community at large. Many institutions' libraries will continue to subscribe
to AGU journals in print for reasons of economy; the DOI is awkward for
anyone accessing print collections in libraries.
(2) The DOI carries no information about article length, which is
valuable for many obvious reasons.
(3) Citation based on the DOI takes up extra print space. Less than
20 characters are typically required for indicating volume number and page
range (e.g. "24, 1654-1675" entails 13 characters). The extra length of the
DOI may cause the citation to spill over onto a new line, thus taking up
even more space. The difference is probably not trivial for high-profile
journals like Science and Nature, where space is at a premium.
(4) The DOI strings are likely prone to transcription error because,
with so many characters in an unbroken string, they are hard to scan by
eye. We don't live in a perfect copy-and-paste world, and a significant
percentage of people will be typing in these DOIs.
In summary, the decision to eliminate sequential page numbering of journal
articles in favor of the DOI has created many problems for AGU readers and
authors. One might be tempted to argue that these are problems of
transition which will be reduced once people adapt to the new system. In
fact, every one of the problems listed above will present a continuing
difficulty, which will only be lessened if the entire scientific journal
publishing enterprise changes the way it cites articles to AGU's unique
approach.
We therefore request that the decision at AGU to eliminate sequential page
numbering and to require use of the DOI for citation purposes be revisited.
The collective practices of scientific publishers show that sequential page
numbering for journal/articles is possible in an online world. If, for some
reason, AGU finds sequential page numbering to be difficult, a
user-friendly scheme co-existing with the DOI could be developed in which
various methods/terms are used to identify and number journal articles
within volumes/issues without the usage of sequential pagination, like
fascicules, parts, etc. In all likelihood, an acceptable scheme exists
which entails only
minor changes to the present AGU production process.
Sincerely,
Ralph Keeling
Assoc. Prof., Scripps Institution of Oceanography
Jeff Severinghaus
Assoc. Prof., Scripps Institution of Oceanography
Peter Brueggeman
Director, Scripps Institution of Oceanography Library
=============================================================
Peter Brueggeman, Director, Scripps Institution of Oceanography Library
UCSD, 9500 Gilman Dr, Dept 0219, San Diego CA 92093-0219 USA
pbrueggeman@ucsd.edu Tel 858/534-1230 Fax 858/534-5269
Response from Jon Sears, AGU Publisher of Secondary Services
"the reasons behind the new recommended citation format stem from the fact
that articles are now published online "as ready", and therefore need to be
citeable immediately -- when print pagination may not be finalized. AGU's
policy is that the online article is the document of record, as you may
know.
We have heard some concerns over the lack of pagination in the citation,
but we feel that the DOI is the better approach. We realize that the lack
of pagination in a citation makes it a bit more complicated to locate an
article in the printed issue, but the citation does include the volume and
issue, and there is a DOI index in each issue to help locate a specific
article.
Also we have added an online DOI Resolver to help users to obtain a "
standard" citation, including pagination, which you can find at
http://agu.org/pubs/doifind.html. It is updated daily, as new articles are
published.
You may have noted that the 2002 JGR article pagination is not now simply
continuous, but reflects the order in the issue, or special section or
subset if applicable. More information is available onine:
http://www.agu.org/pubs/e_publishing/
(Scroll down to "Some Ways Electronic Publishing Will Be Different")
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed May 01 2002 - 06:53:55 PDT