Dissemination of Japanese Academic Journals over the Internet

Jun Adachi

adachi@rd.nacsis.ac.jp

Research and Development Department
NACSIS (National Center for Science Information Systems)

3-29-1 Otsuka, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 112, Japan

Abstract

NACSIS started an Internet-based document delivery service called NACSIS-ELS in April 1997. As of September 1997, 25 Japanese academic societies are participating in this service and 48 scientific journal pages will be captured and made available on NACSIS-ELS. The history for the development of NACSIS-ELS is described and the copyright charging strategy is discussed for two models, i.e., an individual user model and an institutional use model. Other issues related to electronic journals are also mentioned such as security protection measures, academic society activities over the Internet, and the issues for the establishment of globally distributed digital libraries.

Keywords

NACSIS, NACSIS-ELS, electronic library, digital library, SGML, document delivery, database, document image, information retrieval, copyright

1 Introduction

The National Center for Science Information Systems (NACSIS) is providing an electronic document delivery service which is named NACSIS-ELS (NACSIS Electronic Library Service) from April 1997. In this service Japanese academic journals are captured and provided for researchers through the Internet.

The main focus of this paper is on the tentative policies concerning service and copyright processing rather than the technical aspects of NACSIS-ELS. In the next section, the characteristics of NACSIS-ELS is briefly described. Section 3 is for explaining general view for the present method of copyright processing. In the following section, the different model, i.e., an institutional use model, is proposed. Then, mentioning the remaining issues for the establishment of globally distributed digital libraries, the paper is concluded.

2 The characteristics of NACSIS-ELS

2.1 NACSIS overview

NACSIS, which was established in 1986, is one of the inter-university research institutions under the Japanese Ministry of Education, Science, Culture and Sports. The major role of NACSIS is to provide support for scientists and universities in terms of (1) information services, more specifically, compilation of scientific databases, services of online information retrieval from those databases, (2) services related to university library networking and union catalog databases of books and serials, and (3) the management and operation of the Internet backbone for Japanese universities.

Recently available NACSIS-ELS, which was developed by the staff of NACSIS R&D Department, has a close relationship with the above mentioned NACSIS database activities.

2.2 Cooperation with Academic Societies

NACSIS is supporting the activities of Japanese academic societies in terms of compiling bibliographic records of technical reports and conference papers which cannot be easily obtained through usual publication distribution systems.

NACSIS considers that gray literatures such as SIG reports and conference proceedings are of common importance for researchers and scientists as well as academic periodicals. Therefore, NACSIS started the bibliographic database compilation of Japanese gray literature.

These databases are mounted in NACSIS-IR, the online information retrieval service provided by NACSIS. At present, 63 societies are participating in this database compilation.

NACSIS has also started the compilation of full-text records of articles in some scientific journals in cooperation with the publishing departments of several societies. NACSIS proposes to use SGML format for full-text encoding, but the number of journals are limited and we must say that SGML database compilation is still at an experimental stage in Japan.

2.3 Japanese Academic Societies

Major reason that the government supports the activities of societies through NACSIS operations is that in Japan the scales of individual academic societies are rather small compared with those of the U.S., although the number of societies are more than one thousand. Therefore, the financial state of societies is weak and sometimes they have difficulty in publishing materials. Japanese societies are responsible for scholarly publication in Japanese language, which are not easily subscribed outside Japan. This makes societies financially weaker in the age of the Internet in which English is prevailing. On the other hand, some societies publish journals in English, but journals obtaining international reputation are not many and most of them have small subscriptions from overseas.

2.4 Service Overview

NACSIS considered that the next stage for further dissemination of scientific information is primary information service produced by societies. In this context, the development of NACSIS-ELS was planned and the service is now become available for Japanese researchers.

NACSIS-ELS accumulates scientific and scholarly information, such as machine-readable journal articles, proceedings and technical reports. Firstly, the database server stores conventional bibliographic databases. These databases are basically the same as those provided on NACSIS-IR.

As well as these databases, the server holds document image databases of scientific journals, which include all pages from cover page to back cover. Pages are captured in a raster image format.

Journals are acquired from Japanese academic societies which have given NACSIS permission to use their journals for the NACSIS-ELS service. As of September 1997, 25 societies are participating in NACSIS-ELS and 48 journals is to be available on the Internet within 1997. Since the talk with societies on copyright charging issues is still going on, the charge for the time being is free. We are preparing to start the charge collection from April 1998.

3 Copyright Issues in NACSIS-ELS

3.1 Overview

The copyright processing, by which fees are collected from users and divided among the participating copyright holders, i.e., societies, has a close relationship with the service policies and technical design issues. NACSIS has been negotiating with societies for years and the general scheme was already established; we are now talking of the details of the scheme and the price setting of each service items.

As NACSIS-ELS permits users displays and printouts of journal pages, the central server detects each user action such as page display and printout, and logs detailed usage information. The copyright charge will be calculated periodically based on the statistical processing of the log records. The items to be charged and their unit charge are now under negotiation.

In this section, the issues concerning price setting will be described.

3.2 Anxieties of Societies

In summary, the anxieties of societies against NACSIS-ELS are the potentialities of (1) losing journal subscription and (2) the decrease of members because of tremendously easy accessibility to the information produced by societies.

NACSIS anticipates that NACSIS-ELS will boost the society activities without negative influences and has been deliberately talking with societies on the price setting strategy.

3.3 Principles

The copyrights of materials should be already transferred from individual authors of articles to the societies. NACSIS will compile database of journals which are issued from now on. The retrospective digitization is considered separately from the digitization of forthcoming journal issues. This is because many Japanese societies has not yet clearly enacted copyright transfer contracts between authors and societies, thus the contracts for retrospective conversion tend to be complicated and tedious.

The tentative scheme includes two different kinds of user profile. The first one is an individual user model and the other is an institutional use model.

3.4 Individual User

Several charging models are observed in Internet-based information services at present. The first one is a service free of charge. When charges are applied, some services are provided on a fixed monthly rate with user access control. In the case of NACSIS-ELS, we will adopt a pay-per-use policy with user access control.

Thus, a user account and a password are given to each registered user and he or she has to pay copyright charge according to the amount of usage. This is completely the same as the conventional commercial information retrieval services. The collected charge will be distributed among societies proportionally to the usage of their materials.

According to the tentative agreement, societies define unit charges separately for page displays and page printouts; they can differentiate charges depending on journal titles and page attributes such as contents pages, article pages and announcement pages.

On the other hand, societies can settle discount rate for members. Another policy that societies can define is the delay of information availability on the Internet after print publication. Those societies worrying about losing subscriptions can set this delay longer, for instance, six months.

We have made such a complicated system instead of adopting a common page charge for every journal, because some incentives are necessary for societies to participate in this project.

For societies who worry about losing members, they can set the page access free of charge for members; those societies that generally fear the negative effects of online journals can set page charges prohibitively high. This will discourage users from using those societies' journals.

Although such measures for price setting may confuse users in browsing pages, they will alleviate the anxieties of societies caused by the ambiguous transition towards the electronic journals. Unfortunately we do not have reasonable levels of access charges for scientific information for now. It takes time to obtain the price equilibrium for online journals.

As online journals become more familiar, then societies will rethink they can earn more income through such services and they may set charges lower and more acceptable for general users. NACSIS considers that the early launching of journal digitization is the most important for providing useful databases for researchers.

Some societies, however, do not have such worries and simply regard NACSIS-ELS as a new booster for society activities and communications among members. In such cases, they will not hesitate to set the charges low and reasonable.

In the near future, electronic cash will be employed with copyright protection capability embedded in the image data. This will enable us to make the charging procedure even simpler.

4 Institutional Use Model

4.1 Problems of Individual User Model

Since the above described individual user model was made after the conventional information retrieval services, the total payment of users tends to be higher than the case of using print publication at libraries in universities and research institutions.

The problem is who pay for the information usage. Only issuing accounts for individual users will not grow NACSIS-ELS service. University libraries cannot afford to pay for all usage of students and patrons, because the charge tends to be high and it is difficult to estimate the necessary total. Therefore, the individual user model will apply only for a limited number of researchers who have enough money to pay for online journals.

4.2 Institutional Use Model

The institutional use model was invented after the conventional journal subscription model. Institutions pay annual fixed charge for journal use. Societies define the rate according to the nature of institution and the number of potential users. People inside the institutions can access the subscribed journals freely. For non-subscribed journals they have to pay according to individual user model tariff.

The advantages of institutional use model are:

(1) institutions can estimate the necessary annual budget for information usage and select journals to subscribe,

(2) societies can estimate the annual income from institutional users and this makes their financial states more stable, and

(3) NACSIS can reduce the workload to calculate usage and distribute the charges among societies.

NACSIS is continuing the discussion on this model with societies and in the near future the institutional use model will be incorporated into the NACSIS-ELS charging tariff.

5 Remaining Issues

5.1 Service Schedule

As the reasonable levels of copyright charges for electronic journals is not clear for now, the service for 1997 is provided free of charge. Participating societies favorably accepted this proposal made by NACSIS. This was possible because journal titles and articles stored are limited and we could anticipate that we have to wait for some time until users begin to heavily access electronic materials.

In 1998, the individual user model based charging system will be introduced. Analyzing the usage profile and experience of NACSIS-ELS service, we will implement more details of the institutional use model. We hope this model will be incorporated during 1998.

5.2 Society Activities over the Internet

Through the talk with societies, we have found the real problem is what and how academic societies play in the digital age. Some societies already permit members to provide their papers on their personal web sites. Strictly speaking, this may violate the copyright of the societies.

Some societies may shift and intensify the nature as scientific publishers; other may make more effort to strengthen the communication among members in various media and expand the publicity and enlightenment activities through network.

NACSIS will keep watching such metamorphosis of academic societies and update the characteristics of NACSIS-ELS service.

5.3 Technical Issues

Although the password control and the encryption of document images are employed in NACSIS-ELS, further complicated measures for ensuring security are not applied, such as embedding electronic watermark into images.

This kind of technology may be necessary for secure service of copyrighted materials, but for the time being, we do not introduce further measures for this purpose. The trend of how people accept this kind of technology is unclear and we are prepared to employ more secure capability into NACSIS-ELS in accordance with the acceptance to the society.

5.4 Variety of Publications

Recently, several publishers have started providing electronic materials and the commercial servers are already working for limited journal titles. Too many servers with small collection will not make it easier for users to have access to a wide variety of materials, because users have to make contract with a lot of service agents and system usages tend to be different.

To establish globally distributed digital libraries in which people can search and browse every kind of materials with their interests, we have to consider equipping with the following functionalities:

(1) archiving function in different sites,

(2) appropriate control function for avoiding access concentration,

(3) function to keep persistency of information,

(4) function to avoid illegal modification of information, and

(5) uniform and common access functions to distributed servers.

In parallel with these technical development, social system to control intellectual property right will be required to establish economically healthy distributed digital libraries that are also acceptable from a user's point of view.

6 Concluding Remarks

NACSIS-ELS can be categorized as an online document delivery system integrated with bibliographic databases, specially designed for scientific and scholarly publications. The full-fledged service of NACSIS-ELS with copyright processing functions will expedite the dissemination of scholarly information and facilitate easy access to Japanese scholarly publications, in particular, scientific journals written in English for overseas scientists.

The latest information concerning the NACSIS-ELS project can be accessed on the World Wide Web.

References

[1] Negishi, M., ``Databases of NACSIS (in Japanese),'' Joho-Shori, Vol. 33, No. 10, pp. 1144-1153 (1992).

[2] Negishi, M., ``Recent development in full text database applications (in Japanese),'' Joho-Shori, Vol. 33, No. 4, pp.413-420 (1992).

[3] Adachi, J. and Hashizume, H., ``NACSIS Electronic Library System: Its Design and Implementation,'' Proceedings of International Symposium on Digital Libraries 1995, pp.36 - 41 (August 1995).

[4] URL: http://www.nacsis.ac.jp