At the Division F business meeting on Wednesday May 24, a majority of members present voted that their concerns about aspects of the electronic publication of ASM journals, and the pricing of ASM journals should be addressed to Dr. Sam Kaplan, Chair of the Publications Board and the ASM Press.
On May 29, Frank Odds, Chair, Division F, wrote to Dr. Kaplan as follows:
Dear Dr. Kaplan,
At the meeting of Division F we held during the Los Angeles ASM last week, several members expressed strong feelings about the difficulties they faced in accessing electronic versions of ASM journals via their libraries. Many libraries refuse to subscribe to the electronic versions of the ASM journals because ASM will not supply them via bulk distributors of on-line journals (OVID was the example mentioned at the meeting).
There was clear concern that, in the context of the present very rapid evolution and expansion of provision of scientific articles on line, the ASM journals may be at risk of becoming unattractive to authors, members and libraries because they have become both slow to publish and high priced relative to competitor journals, and they are not available through the most widely used electronic channels.
In a vote, a clear majority of 22 to 16 Division F members required me to write to you to express these concerns.
With kind regards.
On June 12, Dr. Kaplan responded as follows:
Dear Dr. Odds:
Your letter of May 29 was forwarded to me in order that I might respond to your questions and those of other members of Division F recently described at the annual meeting in L.A.
With regard to our supplying our E journal via bulk distributors. There are several reasons. They tend to be much slower than our current methods of using fulfillment servers of various descriptions. When you use an aggregator you actually don't know what you are getting for your particular journal since it tends to be a lump method of payment. However, you clearly do not achieve the same price as the current method. Also, your journal is lumped together with many other journals on the list and you have very little choice as to your partners. I think this tends to depreciate the value of the journal especially since the ASM journals which are of high quality tend to carry lesser quality journals in the deal.
As to the so-called high price of ASM journals. Unless I know to that which we are being compared, this is an impossible question to answer. However, very recent comparisons of ASM journals to what must be considered to be their peers in terms of quality reveals that our pricing is not only comparable but in most cases substantially lower. If you then add in the breadth of coverage and the numbers of pages, there is virtually no one even close.
Finally, speed of publication. We keep rather extensive statistics in this area for each journal and therefore I can only cite an avg. which is along the following. From time of receiving the receipted ms in DC to the time it is accepted is approx. 104 days. However, nearly half of that time is actually taken by the authors to revise the ms. This leaves approx. 7 weeks of review process. If we consider transit time etc. the we are left with approx. 5 to under 6 weeks in review. However, to effectively consider this number, the volume of ms reviewed by ASM reviewers is no small part of the equation. We are hoping that when we go to electronic submission, review etc., this time will drop.
I have attempted as best as possible to answer your questions and those of your colleagues.
Sam Kaplan
This website is supported by ASM and the Membership Board.
This website was created by Division F which is responsible for its contents.
Copyright © 1998 American
Society for Microbiology
Send comments or corrections to: lhoyer@uiuc.edu