June 17, 1997

Ray Everngam
Assistant Director, Communications
Entomological Society of America
9301 Annapolis Road
Lanham, MD 20706-3115

Dear Mr. Everngam:

This letter is in response to Tom Walker’s letter to me dated April 18 requesting a proposal for archiving ESA’s electronic journal article reprints on the facilities of the Florida Center for Library Automation (FCLA).

Before addressing the specific issues raised in Tom’s letter, I need to point out that FCLA is part of the State University System (SUS) of Florida, and as library computer professionals in state higher education, our perspective is one of preserving scholarly information, rather than publishing as a commercial enterprise. As such, we are only interested in covering our costs, not making a profit. This perspective will be more obvious as I comment on the issues raised by Tom. An attachment to this letter explains FCLA in a bit more detail.

To turn to the issues raised by Tom, and taking them in the same order, we propose the following arrangements with ESA:

• Cost. FCLA will charge $1 per page at the time the pages are originally posted. There will not be any additional charges. These costs can be “collected” by issuing credits against subscriptions for the six ESA journals at all the SUS libraries. Should so many new pages be added in any year that the subscription costs are exceeded, then FCLA could invoice ESA for the additional charge. At present, SUS libraries are spending about $2,800 per year on ESA journals. As an alternative payment method, we could just agree that ESA will immediately provide free subscriptions to any SUS library subscribers and FCLA will not bill any charges. This alternative would cost ESA the lost revenue of $2,800, but would protect ESA from paying upwards of $6,000 later.
• Duration. FCLA intends to keep ESA e-reprints online indefinitely. However, since FCLA is a state agency subject to reductions in funding, we cannot guarantee that the e-reprints can be kept online or forever. Since you own the e-reprints, we would of course send them to you on tape or other acceptable medium before removing them from our server. We need to have further discussion concerning refunds. Perhaps e-reprints stored for three or more years would not require a refund and those stored for less than three years would merit a partial refund. If, on the other hand, we have agreed that no money will change hands because you would have forgiven subscription charges, then reinstating subscription charges would be a form of “refund.”
• Accessibility. The bandwidth of FCLA’s Internet connection is 45 Mbps, but it is shared with the rest of the University of Florida (UF). UF is also a founding member of Internet2 so our Internet speeds to other major universities will increase dramatically in less than 12 months.
  

The speed of our server is really an issue of speed of the data storage devices. Our storage plan is to load the newly arriving ESA e-reprints on high speed RAID disks. The RAID disks will transfer e-reprints at very high speed (about I second) to UF’s Internet router. Any delays should be caused by the amount of congestion on the Internet. If an e-reprint is not requested for some period of time, we will migrate it to a slower speed optical jukebox. If an e-reprint on the optical jukebox is later requested, it will be moved from the jukebox back to the RAID, a transfer that will add about 20 seconds to the delivery time. However, since the e-reprint will have been moved back to the RAID, additional requests will once again be very fast until such time as the e-reprint goes unused and is once again migrated to the jukebox. The software which does the migration is an IBM product called ADSM, and it should migrate the e-reprints without any impact on the URLs.


FCLA is willing to mirror the ESA tables of contents. This mirror version can be limited to a backup role, or it could have a primary role for certain users, e.g., ones on Internet2 or ones located in the southeastern U.S.


• URLs. The naming convention proposed in Tom’s letter looks workable to us. It is clear and straight forward. We no longer require the “ufl” portion in our web address so the URL could be shortened to “www.fcla.edu...” Also, since Environmental Entomology is identified by “EnvEnt”, the final element of the URL could even be changed to, using Tom’s example, something like “v25pI257.pdf”. As with many of the issues discussed in this letter, the naming convention for the URLs can be discussed further before all of us agree to a final collective decision.
• Posting new files. Probably the most efficient way for ESA to post new e-reprints is for a technical member of the ESA staff to FTP the files directly onto the FCLA RAID in the ESA subdirectory. We can provide this person with a user ID that will give permission to do this. This user ID will also be able to update our mirror copy of the ESA tables of contents. If this technique is acceptable, the postings will thus be immediate, and there will be no time lapse waiting on staff action at FCLA.
  
• Termination. If FCLA cannot continue to accept ESA e-reprints, we can give you 120 days notice, during which time we will continue to accept e-reprints and make them freely available. We can also provide you with an additional 60 days notice before removing the e-reprints already stored on the FCLA server.
  
  

To offer a concluding observation and suggestion, there are actually two ways to approach this project. One way is to enter into a formal contract with the University of Florida Contracts and Grants office. If we do this, my comments here would be superseded by formal contract terms. This approach will be more expensive because university overhead will have to be added. The second approach is to continue as we are beginning now, i.e. to put together a written memorandum of understanding that is less than an official contract. We could agree to start with a trial experiment to run for, say, three years. At the end of two years, we could re-evaluate and decide to disband, continue as is or progress to a formal agreement. I suggest we begin with the second approach, and see what we learn from the experience.

Sincerely yours,

James F. Corey

cc: Tom Walker, ESA Electronic Publication Implementation Committee
Gene Hemp, UF Vice Provost

This document is a slightly reformatted version of the original. It is posted with permission of the author.