ABSTRACT
The arrival of royalty-paying, inexpensive fax delivery networks will greatly ease concerns of copyright law and faculty goodwill on the part of librarians when cancelling journals. Librarians realize that it will be cheaper to give free fax delivery of individual articles to their faculty than to take subscriptions to many of the typically voluminous and expensive journals that faculty have come to expect on library shelves. Some journals of high demand will always be locally held, but subscriptions to others will likely continue only as long as taking them is cheaper than repeatedly requesting faxes. Since publishers will still greatly prefer to get advance subscriptions (with all the revenue up front), rather than after-the-fact piecemeal payments, they may actually have a financial incentive to publish fewer but higher demand articles in their existing journals so as to tip purchasing calculations in favor of maintaining subscriptions to them. Ironically, through article-specific fax royalty reports, smart publishers will have a tool that enables them to concentrate only on authors who are likely to sustain subscription loyalty through genuinely interesting papers. The warning signs of “at risk” journals have actually long been available to both publishers and librarians through studies of pricing and citation data, but often have been ignored. We report a long term analysis of citation data with some reference to pricing from 1979–1989, and predict which journals have the best chances to remain locally held in the 1990s, and which are likely to go to “fax-access-only.” We invite working librarians who make frequent use of fax as a substitute for cancelled journals to report to us any correlation of their experiences with our forecasts.
