[NHC List] Request for comments from BioOne users

[Johnson, Steve]

Dear NHC-listers, 

On Friday morning, June 23rd, I will be participating (by telephone) in
BioOne's Library Advisory Group meeting at ALA.
This note is an invitation for you to communicate your comments on any
aspect of the BioOne ejournal collection.

Because of BioOne's track record of dependability and affordability, it
is easy for BioOne subscribers  to make no comment except in the form of
a subscription renewal.  Lack of user comments starves BioOne management
of the user feedback they need to keep the system in tune with the needs
of users, as well as publishers. I think the publishers are always quick
to speak up on behalf of their interests.

One recent change in BioOne that I will be mentioning on Friday is the
changed location of the article citation download function. This
function was formerly listed, with a a checkbox, adjacent to abstract,
fulltext, and pdf formats.  The citation download function is now
accessible only from the full text view of the article, in the "table of
contents" box. The new location is sufficiently obscure that when I went
looking for it, I thought that BioOne had removed this feature
altogether. I was moved to send a comment to BioOne technical support,
which pointed me to the new location.

One result of this change is that non-subscribers are prevented from
using the citation download feature. I think this restriction of
functionality is detrimental, in some small way, to the authors of the
cited papers and the journals in which they publish and to BioOne. Other
publishers, such as Blackwell-Synergy, permit non-subscribers to
download citations for use in bibliography managers. Restricting access
to citations would only seem to make sense for publishers of citation
databases.  

In any case, I would be happy to communicate your comments on BioOne via
the Library Advisory Group. 

Thank you!

Steve Johnson
Manager, Bronx Zoo Library
Wildlife Conservation Society
sjohnson at wcs.org
718 220-6719 voice
718 220-7114 fax