Journal ECOLOGY is online

[Una Smith]

All back issues of the most prominent ecology journal, ECOLOGY (begun in
the 1920's), are now available on the Internet.  I posted the following
article about this to sci.bio.ecology (aka ECOLOG-L).  I'm re-posting it
here in the hope that you will find it interesting.

Another item:  Allen Press, the company that prints ECOLOGY, also prints
AJB, PALEOBIOLOGY, THE WILSON BULLETIN, and many, many other professional
society journals.  Recently, I submitted digital images for a paper to
be printed by Allen Press.  My contact at Allen Press requested an image
density of 350 dots per inch.  She explained that Allen Press now scans
all photographic print (hard copy) submissions and prints entirely from
digital files.  Consequently, digital image submissions are essentially
indistinguishable from conventional photographic print submissions, in
terms of the final product.

What is the connection between Allen Press's printing and the article
below?  It has been said that it is easy to put ECOLOGY online because
the journal has few (no?) photographs, but image-heavy journals cannot
be put online (yet) because the images wouldn't be good enough.  Well,
for many of us that argument is effectively no longer true.

Cheers,

        Una Smith


> Bob Peet, Editor-in-Chief of ESA journals, wrote:
>
> >... members of ESA who subscribe to the Society's journals will be able
> >to obtain access to all back issues on-line (in a fully searchable format;
> >you could count how many times your names appears, for example) for a very
> >small supplement (if any) to the regular subscription price.  This already
> >exists and I have password access to the product now.
>
> This is part of the JSTOR project, which is available now, free, at some
> universities on a trial basis.  Yale is one of those universities, and I
> have used this service.  Some of the advantages I've found are as follows:
>
> 1. The full-text search tool is extremely valuable, as it permits you to
> identify papers on topics of interest now, that were not the focus of the
> papers (and thus not mentioned in the title or keywords used by indexing
> services).
>
> 2.  Get high quality "reprints":  the articles are stored as photographic
> page images.  These images are *much* better than a photocopy or ancient,
> crumbling reprint, and almost as good as a fresh new reprint, if you have
> a good laser printer with PostScript.
>
> 3. Convenience:  save a trip to the library and time spent photocopying;
> everything can be done from your desk, if you have the hardware available
> (as many of us do).
>
> 4. No more need to photocopy or print out every article that is remotely
> interesting;  make printouts only when you need to.  Librarians call this
> approach to document-delivery "just in time", rather than "just in case".
>
> 5. Dramatic increase in access:  not all institutions have a full run of
> ECOLOGY in their libraries.  Soon, ESA members may buy individual annual
> subscriptions to the *entire run* of the journal.
>
>
> Check your institution's library Web pages for JSTOR, or check out
> the JSTOR home page (http://www.jstor.org/).
>
>       Una Smith
>       Department of Biology
>       Yale University