Ramblings & Musings

I would like to express my personal opinion, which is extreme: I find electronic versions much more convenient: one can access them instantly from home,..., one can search them, copy and paste. Many journals and some books edited in pre-TeX epoch are now digitalized and one can access them either free unconditionally or free if there is a site license.

I find that TeXnical quality of papers in arXiv is better than in the electronic
copies of print journals.

One needs to remember some extra money costs associated with print journals: binding, keeping them, and moving them too; also these journals tend to be borrowed/lost exactly in the moment one needs them which is never the case with e-journals (well, sometimes web site could be down but the library could be just closed). Also going to vacations one can take in laptop much more copies of e-journals than of print journals would fit into an average track.

However with journals not free but subscribed one must take into account the following:

Both librarian and webmaster can run things poorly.

While paper journals belong to a particular library, the site license belongs to the whole University. Thus one needs to compare the price of site license and a single paper subscription. If the same journal is in few libraries then some negotiations are needed to replace some of paper subscriptions by site license and share the savings. Finally, one needs to make sure that if we replace our paper subscription by a site license, it will be OUR license which means that decision to continue with it, or cancel it, or replace by something else would be to our sole discretion.

Note that the relative prices of electronic vs paper can drastically change in the future.

There is another difference between electronic and paper subscriptions at least with some journals: electronic subscription can give you access to (may be) all volumes of some journal but only during the subscription year.

With PJM my attempts to get full text from UT IP address result in the same error message even if I am looking for 2002 year paper; 2001 year papers are available even from my motel IP (which definitely has no subscription).

So, if in 2007 we subscribe electronically for Galactic Journal of Mathematics we (probably) get all its volumes from 1089 BC until now, but if we cancel subscription in 2008 all this wealth disappears. Unless we download everything and save it on hard disk(s) and run our little Department server. Not sure if it is legal but I cannot recall signing anything which prevents me (individually) from keeping legally downloaded article as long as I need it. Copying and distributing it may be another matter.

It could be different with other journals: say our turpion.org subscription for Russian Math. Surveys (translated to English Uspehi Matematicheskih Nauk) covers relatively recent volumes but not really old ones, but Stanford has also subscription for old volumes (however one can consider this as two different journals, and subscription for each covers the whole range of years).

Practical conclusions: if our University is subscribed electronically to some journal and you think that you may use some article in the future, save it now, without waiting when some smart guy from the central library cancel subscription to save mony for Library Science Newsletter or Marxism-Mazohism Daily.

Also if you visit some University which has an electronic subscription to some journal we do not, and you think that you may use some article in the future, save it now! If you do not have the laptop with you, save it and sftp or just email it (again, it is no different from making photocopy and taking with you).

Finally, it is possible that the exactly the same article published in the journal we have no access is published in arXiv or on web page of the author. So far I did not hear that mathematical journals restrict this, but I heard that in the social sciences many journals are much more keen about the author rights and require an oath from the author that an electronic copy of the submitted paper was never published and moreover will not be published as well.