ELECTRONIC PUBLICATION AT MIT
By Janet H. Fisher Associate Director for Journals Publishing MIT Press Fisher@mitvma.mit.edu
Beginning in late summer 1994 we will begin publishing a peer-reviewed electronic journal called _Chicago Journal of Theoretical Computer Science_. With the same attention to peer-review and editorial quality that the Press applies to its twenty-eight print journals, we believe this journal will be important to the scholarly community for several reasons. It provides high-quality, backed by a standard publisher * incorporates the advantages of the electronic medium that scholars need * gives librarians an electronic publication purchasable by standard subscription procedures, accompanied by liberal use-guidelines consistent with its electronic form of publication; it is available through vendors * is committed to inclusion in traditional indexing and abstracting services * is committed to archiving by agreement with the MIT Libraries and a back-up archive
We anticipate publishing 15 articles in the first calendar year (the equivalent of a standard tri-annual publication); subscriptions will be available for $125 for institutions and $30 for individuals for a calendar year period. Subscribers will receive a notice each time an article is published, and instructions on how to retrieve the article from the Press's FTP site. Because of the need to transmit math, graphics, and symbols, articles will be available in LaTeX source (which is ubiquitous in the field of computer science, and thus preferred by individuals) and PostScript (which is preferred by libraries). Hardcopy of articles will be available from MIT Libraries Document Services Department.
Subscribers will be allowed unlimited access to the articles published during the calendar year. In later years, subscribers will be able to access the file of articles published before the current subscription year by paying an additional fee above their subscription fee. We are considering providing electronic copies of articles to non-subscribers for a per-article fee.
We are publishing this journal without difficult-to-administer restrictions with the assumption that librarians and individuals will be willing to pay for what they use. Having paid a subscription price, we believe libraries should be able to use the journal in a way that reflects what they currently do with paper journals and that recognizes the differences inherent in the electronic medium, such as:
store articles electronically on a library server and allow the local
community to print or download copies
- print out and store articles on library shelves
- print out articles and allow users to take them from the librar
- print out articles and store them on reserve if requested by a professor
- print out articles and share them with other libraries under standar
interlibary loan procedures
- place articles on a campus network for access by local users
- convert articles to another medium (i.e. microfilm/fiche/CD) for storag
Individual subscribers will be able to:
- store articles on their personal computer
- download and retain a paper copy of the article
- convert the files to another program
- perform reasonable format conversions
The journal will be archived by agreement with the MIT Libraries and Information Systems department. A back-up archive site has been set as Scholarly Communications Project, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Paper copies of individual articles will be available to non-subscribers from MIT Libraries Document Services.
Janet H. Fisher Associate Director for Journals Publishing MIT Press Fisher@mitvma.mit.edu