Electronic Publishing in Academia
Malcolm Getz · The Serials Librarian · 1999
The Library at Washington University reports 150,000 hits per year on its electronic, networked Encyclopedia Britannica at a cost to the Library of four cents per hit.[Baker, 1996] This rate of use seems to be an order of magnitude larger than the rate of use of the print version of the document in the library.At the same time, the volunteer Project Gutenberg whose goal was to build an electronic file of 10,000 classic, public domain texts on the Internet has failed to sustain itself. 1 The University of Illinois decided it could no longer afford to provide the electronic storage space and no other entity stepped forward to sustain the venture.A first lesson here is that production values, the quality of indexing and presentation, the packaging and marketing of the work, matter.Those ventures that take the approach of unrestricted free access don't necessarily dominate ventures that collect revenues.When a shopper asks ''What does it cost?''we can naturally respond, ''What is it worth to you?''Electronic communication among academics is growing