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- Path: sparky!uunet!dtix!darwin.sura.net!haven.umd.edu!mimsy!afterlife!adm!smoke!abc
- From: abc@brl.mil (Brinton Cooper)
- Newsgroups: comp.org.ieee
- Subject: Re: Looking for computer-readable Index to IEEE publications
- Summary: It isn't free; IEEE needs the money.
- Message-ID: <19091@smoke.brl.mil>
- Date: 20 Aug 92 19:37:16 GMT
- References: <meybrink.713786691@rhein> <1992Aug14.210508.6474@dfv.rwth-aachen.de>
- Sender: news@smoke.brl.mil
- Organization: The US Army Research Laboratory
- Lines: 54
- cc: dec@dfv.rwth-aachen.de
-
- In article <1992Aug14.210508.6474@dfv.rwth-aachen.de> dec@dfv.rwth-aachen.de (Peter Decker) writes:
- >By the way,
- >I know, that all articles of some IEEE Transactions are managed in
- >BibTeX-Format.
-
- >Would it be possible to get these entries via usenet.
-
- >I am especially interested in
- >IEEE Transactions on Communication
- >IEEE Transactions on Computation
- >IEEE Transactions Vehicular Techology
- >IEEE Communication Magazine
-
- This is a perfectly reasonable and completely naive request. Every
- year, at election time, candidates for IEEE office and Computer Society
- positions especially make impressive pronouncements about "improving
- member services" through the use of "state-of-the-art technology."
- We're told that we are moving into the
-
- *Information Age*
-
- and how, under his/her leadership, the IEEE (or one of its societies)
- will exploit Information Age advances to improve "member services."
-
- However, this ignores the fact that IEEE makes significant revenues
- selling Transactions packages to university and corporate libraries.
- For example, the IEEE's "All-Society Periodicals" package (which, one
- would guess, provides a subscription to every IEEE Transactions, the
- magazines such as Computer, and, perhaps, the Proceedings) costs $7995,
- a savings of $4069 off the "combined (separate?) subscription prices."
- The quotes are from an ad on the back cover of the June, 1992, issue of
- Proceedings.
-
- As another example, an individual (nonmember) subscription to the IEEE
- Transactions on Information Theory costs $215 annually for six issues.
- Member dues, including subscription, are a small fraction of this.
-
- In addition, libraries pay a great deal of money (by an individual's
- standards) for subscriptions to "Electrical and Electronics Abstracts,"
- the "INSPEC" publication that abstracts and cross-indexes every article
- in every IEEE publication. This, too, is an important source of income
- for IEEE.
-
- Without this income, IEEE and Society dues would be even higher than
- they are. Members cannot have it both ways. If your company or
- university library cannot afford the costs of subscribing to all the
- IEEE publications, ask them, instead, to subscribe to the "Abstracts."
- Then ask them to obtain reprints of articles in which you are
- interested.
-
- _Brint
- --
- _Brinton Cooper
- <abc@brl.mil>, <cooper@udel.edu>, or <ab.cooper@compmail.com>
-