st: re: Stata Technical Bulletin

[Kit Baum <baum@bc.edu>]

Nick and Joe (editors of SJ) said

 what Richard wants is already
possible, at modest cost: for a university library in the USA or Canada,
the price is USD 89 / year. For about 600 pages per year of good quality
technical material, that's quite reasonable, or so I suggest.


This is somewhat misleading. To my understanding subscription by the  
library (which my university library has done) to the Stata Journal  
does not in any way make it electronically available in the way that  
most scholarly journals are available. BC Libraries subscribe to the  
print version because subscription to the electronic edition merely  
would give the library a PDF of the issue. How would the library make  
that available to authorized users? We have access to thousands of e- 
journals through our excellent on-line library system, but that is  
done by the publishers selling the ability of a library to control  
access to their site, which then delivers individual articles (not  
whole issues), with the publishers providing the security.

I agree that the price is most reasonable (especially when viewed in  
light of the debate about rapacious publishers charging libraries  
thousands of dollars per year for some titles) but the availability  
of the SJ electronic edition to libraries is in my mind not useful.  
Patrons expect to have access to articles, not entire issues, and  
libraries expect publishers to be the gatekeepers of who is  
privileged to download the articles. As far as I understand Stata  
Journal is nowhere near providing this kind of service to libraries.  
I would be pleasantly surprised to learn that I am wrong.

Kit

Kit Baum, Boston College Economics and DIW Berlin
http://ideas.repec.org/e/pba1.html
An Introduction to Modern Econometrics Using Stata:
http://www.stata-press.com/books/imeus.html


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