18 April 1997

Mr. James Corey
Director, Florida Center for Library Automation
2002 NW 13th Street, Suite 320
Gainesville, FL 32605

Dear Jim:

Beginning later this year, the Entomological Society of America (ESA) will offer the authors of articles in its journals the opportunity to buy electronic reprints. These “e-reprints” will be posted on WWW as PDF files to make them freely available anywhere, any time, to anyone on the Internet. This letter follows up our previous conversations about Florida Center for Library Automation (FCLA) posting ESA’s e-reprints on its server and requests a written offer.

The journals in question are—

Annals Entomological Society of America,
Journal of Economic Entomology,
Environmental Entomology,
Journal of Medical Entomology,
American Entomologist,
Arthropod Management Tests.

These journals total about 6000 pages annually, but the sale of e-reprints the first year is unlikely to be more than 1000 pages. Once the service becomes familiar to authors, the annual page count is expected to grow quickly.

The ESA’s Workgroup on Electronic Reprints has identified these concerns that should be addressed in FCLA’s proposal:

• Cost. How much per page will FCLA charge for initial posting? What other charges, if any, will there be?
• Duration: Once e-reprints are posted, for how long does FCLA intend to keep them posted? For how long does FCLA guarantee they will be kept posted? If FCLA fails to fulfill this guarantee, what refund will it give ESA?
• Accessibility: What is the bandwidth of FCLA’s Internet connection? What will be the speed of access by the server to the e-reprint files? Is FCLA willing to mirror ESA’s tables of contents for issues for which e-reprints are posted? [The master tables of contents, with links to the PDF files, will be at http:// www.entsoc.org/.]
• URLs: What will be the URLs for ESA’s e-reprints? ESA intends to give the files unique names that identify the journal, volume, and initial page of the article. It expects a separate directory for each journal unless there is good reason to put all articles in the same directory. Thus the file for the first article in the Dec 1996 Environmental Entomology (vol. 25, p. 1257) might be named 25ee1257.pdf and its URL might be http://www.fcla.ufl.edu/ESA/EnvEnt/25ee1257.pdf.
• Posting new files. What procedures must ESA follow to post new PDF files to their appropriate directories on FCLA’s server? If ESA will be directed to FTP new files to one or more “incoming” directories on FCLA’s server, what is the maximum time that will lapse before FCLA transfers the files to their online WWW directories?
• Termination: If FCLA chooses to stop accepting ESA’s e-reprints, how much notice will it give ESA?

Please address these concerns in a letter to Ray Everngam, Assistant Director, Communications, Entomological Society of America, 9301 Annapolis Road, Lanham, MD 20706-3115.

FCLA is to be commended for its willingness to advance the cause of free access to primary scientific literature by offering to post ESA’s e-reprints. I hope that mutually beneficial arrangements will result.

Sincerely,

Thomas J. Walker
Chair, Workgroup on Electronic Reprints
ESA Electronic Publication Implementation Committee

xc: Ray Everngam
John Lloyd