On the Net, Periodicals on the Web

Greg R. Notess
Reference Librarian
Montana State University

ON THE NET

Periodicals on the Web

DATABASE, August 1997
Copyright © Online Inc.

Been to Online, Inc.'s Web site (http://www.onlineinc.com) lately? It features tables of contents and selected articles in full text from ONLINE and DATABASE, including this column. From the publishers' perspective, Online Inc.'s Internet presence provides a means to disseminate information for current and prospective subscribers. It also is an opportunity to offer corporate information and advertise other products and services, such as books and the ONLINE WORLD conference, from the company. Many other commercial publishers have also established an Internet presence offering some online content free.

These same periodicals have often been available for years on the online commercial services. Many articles have discussed the variance in coverage, content, and currency of online full-text editions. Even with some of these limitations, the databases that contain full-text articles are important resources for the information professional. Where now do the free, online Web versions fit into the picture? Are entire issues available on the Web? If so, does the site offer archives and how far back do they go? The questions are many. The answers vary for each individual title and change over time.

THE PUBLISHING DILEMMA

The publishing world has been trying out a variety of solutions to the vexing problems and opportunities that Internet publishing presents. Newspapers, consumer magazines, academic journals, and newsletters have all taken a stab at finding a successful combination of online electronic accessibility and print distribution. While there is little argument over the utility of providing subscription information and descriptions on the Net, there is no agreement on how much freely accessible information a publication can provide before a negative impact is seen on print subscriptions. Should online subscriptions be provided as a supplement only to a print subscription, as an alternative to print subscriptions, or as a complete replacement of print distribution?

Periodicals have a great deal of content that can be offered over the Internet. This ranges from bibliographic information such as a table of contents entry, to extracts, abstracts, full text, and full text with all images and an identical page layout. For the publisher, the trick is to find an appropriate balance between giving enough information away free to attract the attention of the target audience and increase subscriptions. For the information user, the problem lies in determining which content is available for free online. John Marcus wrote about ten of the best in the February 1997 DATABASE [1], but let us take a look at some of the rest. These are all freely available sources rather than subscription services.

THE REGISTRATION APPROACH

Many sites require users to register before they can get to the information content, even if there is no charge for registration. This allows the publisher to get a more accurate sense of what market is reading an online version. The Far Eastern Economic Review offers its Web site (http://www.feer.com) under the name Far Eastern Economic Review Interactive Edition (FEERIE). Use of FEERIE requires a brief, free registration process. But do not expect to gain access to a full online version of the Far Eastern Economic Review. Selected major articles from the most current issue are available, but it does not include the complete issue. Even for those articles that are available in full text, associated pictures, charts, and graphs are excluded. Access to past issues is available through a search option. Unfortunately, the search feature works best by topic or section. It does not include easy access to past issues by date. Nor is there a basic table of contents approach.

Even more than magazines, newspapers have turned to the Net for delivering full-text content. As the primary national newspaper of record, the availability of the New York Times on the Web (http://www.nytimes.com) is a significant resource. Like the Far Eastern Economic Review site, the New York Times requires free registration before allowing access to the content. The site features most articles from the current day's national edition of the New York Times. They also have an archive of older articles going back to 1995. Unfortunately, the site's main emphasis is the current day's news articles. Only some of the articles are available in the archive, primarily from the CyberTimes (which has no print equivalent), Arts and Leisure, Politics, Travel, and Real Estate sections.

Access to the archives is similar to FEERIE in that it uses a search option. The search features available on this free online version of the Times is not very reliable. It offers very basic Boolean searching and sorting of results, but sometimes the date displayed for a specific article is the current day's date rather than the actual date of the article. In addition, since the archive does not contain the full text of the paper, it cannot be relied on for a comprehensive search of the paper.

TRADE PUBLICATIONS

One troubling problem: the titles of articles on the Web site differ from the titles of the same articles in the print edition.

Another type of periodical appearing on the Net is the trade publication. A few of these demonstrate some of the other ways that publishers are putting up their periodicals on the Net. For example, Chemical and Engineering News (http://pubs.acs.org/cen/) offers the table of contents from the current issue and selected "hot articles" from the issue in full text. Other "hot articles" are available in the archive which goes back to March 1995. Only about one article per print issue, on average, qualifies as "hot" and is consequently available on the site.

The current table of contents is available in both PDF and HTML formats. While the PDF version includes the pictures from the print table of contents page, it does not include a link to the HTML version of the featured article like the text version does. The articles are in HTML and include the text but no graphics.

For the construction engineer, ENR provides a Web site (http://www.enr.com/). The ENR site presents a more minimalistic approach to Web publishing. The full text from the cover story of the most recent issue is available along with a graphic of the cover. No other archive of older issues or even bibliographic information is available. However, instead of providing information content from the articles within ENR, the site features a different information resource. The Find a Job button links to a searchable and browsable database of the last four weeks of classified job ads that appeared in the print magazine. For job seekers, this is an excellent resource. For regular readers of ENR, this Web version is no replacement for the print copy.

Advertising Age (http://adage.com/), offers more content than ENR or Chemical and Engineering News but not anything approaching the entire issue. A few selected articles are available in full text from each issue. Most of the available articles relate to the Internet or computer topics, but there are only selected articles on those topics. Even more appear in the print edition. One troubling problem: the titles of articles on the Web site differ from the titles of the same articles in the print edition. Few Web periodicals contain the complete citation to the print version, page numbers being the most commonly neglected piece. But most at least keep the title consistent between the two editions. At least the content of the articles appears to be the same, although like the others, there are no related images or charts. The Advertising Age site includes a variety of sections. Look for the full-text articles under the Articles and Opinions heading.

Beyond the selected full-text articles, Advertising Age demonstrates well the way in which supporting material can be made available online. Providing lengthy files or background data is expensive to include in print issues. However, the Web makes it easy to provide access to large files of supporting information to a print article. For example, the March 10, 1997 issue of Advertising Age includes a one page extract from the Vatican's "Ethics in Advertising." While publishing the entire document would have taken up a substantial portion of the printed issue, and thus been quite expensive, publishing the full version on the Web site is as simple for a brief document as a long one. This is exactly what Advertising Age did, with permission from the copyright holder.

The American Chemical Society (ACS) also uses the Internet to provide access to supplementary files for its Journal of the American Chemical Society. This supplementary material was formerly made available on microfiche. Now it is available online from the ACS Web but only for subscribers to the Journal. The Chronicle of Higher Education (http://chronicle.com/) uses its Web site to provide larger documents and files that may not be available in the print version.

PATHFINDER'S TIME

Time, as one of the Time-Warner Pathfinder titles, provides a significant portion of its publication in this free online version.

Time-Warner's Pathfinder site (http://pathfinder.com) is an example of a more comprehensive approach to offering online content. Pathfinder offers access to a substantial quantity of online content at its site with the full text from recent issues of Time-Warner publications such as Money, People, Sports Illustrated, Time, Fortune, and Entertainment Weekly. No registration is required for access to these titles, and the layout of the top Pathfinder page makes it easy to connect to what is basically an online database for each of these popular consumer publications.

Time, as one of the Time-Warner Pathfinder titles, provides a significant portion of its publication in this free online version. Like many of the others, Time can be found at http://pathfinder.com/time/ or its alias of http://time.com/. The most current issue is featured along with a special online Time Daily. Other features of the Web version of Time include a small multimedia area and a subscriber services section. The Community section includes access to bulletin boards, transcripts of talks, and a weekly interactive chat session. While the multimedia tidbits and the subscription information are obvious matches for a Web site and enticing to the general public, the meat of the information content lies in the magazine itself, which is available appropriately enough via the Magazine button.

Here, the full text of the current issue and several back issues are available. It also includes access to the more difficult to find International editions. Like many commercial online services, the Web version of Time consists primarily of the text itself, excluding pictures, charts, or other graphics. Unlike many other periodicals with Web sites, it includes the full text of almost the entire issue. In comparing article coverage from a few print issues with their Web counterparts, only a couple of essays were missing from the Web versions. However, these are not full image reproductions; the advertisements, pictures, and formatting of the print versions are not available on the Web.

The Time site includes an archive of past issues. The archive's depth is shallow--issues are available back to the beginning of the year. On the plus side, many full-text articles from International editions (for the same time period) are available in the archive. This international coverage makes Pathfinder a richer source for world news coverage than the U.S. edition of Time provides.

With so much of its content online for free, is Time stepping over the edge and hurting its subscriptions? Time will tell, although Time may not. However, I would suspect not. The full-text is in HTML but scrolls from margin to margin with no illustrations or columns. Anyone wanting to read an entire issue of Time would find it difficult, uncomfortable, and far more time-consuming on the Web than in print. For the casual browser of the magazine, the Web version works well, but it loses a great deal of information content in the absence of photographs, charts, graphs, and other graphical representations of information. For the information professional, the Pathfinder version makes a nice supplement, especially for access to the most recent issues. However, the search features and the depth of the archive of full-text versions available on commercial search services far exceeds the information content on the Web.

Web sites offer useful material from periodicals and supplementary information about the publications and their publisher. The availability of some full-text articles from the most current issue of these publications provides an excellent supplement to what is available on commercial online services. Value-added databases that have indexing added to bibliographic and full-text records are essential, but they often do not have the most current issues included due to the time needed to index and add them to the database. That is where Web access to articles from the most current issue becomes so useful. In cases where an appropriate online periodical can be identified that is likely to answer a specific information need, the Web versions may well prove one of the best places to look. For searches where controlled vocabulary indexing and a range of date coverage is needed, the traditional bibliographic databases will deliver much more effective results. For the information professional, the challenge lies in identifying when to use which technique.

REFERENCE

[1] Marcus, John. "The Top Ten Web-Based Newspapers and Magazines." DATABASE 20, No. 1 (February 1997): pp. 80-83.

Communications to the author should be addressed to Greg R. Notess, Montana State University Libraries, Bozeman, MT 59717-0332; 406/994-6563; greg@notess.com ; http://www.notess.com.