At the Cross-Roads:
PRO
- Cross-journal searching
- Desktop access
- Distributed access
- Electronic current awareness / SDI capability
- Embedded supplemental multimedia resources(e.g., audio, video, datafiles)
- Intra- and inter-literature linking
- More efficient use of professional time
- Pay-Per-View Access
- Reduced associated costs
- Remote access for off-campus students, faculty, and staff
- Subscription bundled with print
CON
- Additional associated costs
- Adoption of E-journals is discipline-related
- E-Journals perpetuate a profit-based model to the intellectual property
of university faculty
- Full-text is not complete text of print counterpart
- Images not necessarily in original context
- Inadequate 'browsability'
- Inadequate end-user hardware
- Inadequate institutional network infrastructure
- Licensing restrictions (e.g., document delivery use)
- Lack of critical mass of titles
- Lower quality image resolution
- Need for more seamless linkage between Abstracting and Indexing services and articles
- Permanence of electronic format
- Print bundled with electronic
- Professional acceptance and legitimacy of E-only publication
- Promotion and tenure acceptance
- Internet traffic load
- Uncertain long-term archival access
- Unreliable network access
Due to insufficient support to maintain previous levels of local ownership of professional and popular print journals and magazines, more and more academic and research libraries find it necessary to periodically review and cancel subscriptions to selected serial publications. Concurrently, more publishers now provide distributed access to their journals and other publications via the Internet and the World Wide Web.
While many are embracing electronic journals, others do not consider them a replacement for the journal in the conventional paper format. These lists represent the views of faculty as well as librarians toward E-Journals in the era of print cancellations as extracted from responses to a discussion list query posted in mid-October 1998.