Here at Openly we've been studying how best to deal with AGU's
Journal of Geophysical Research in our ejournal management services.

As many of you probably know, AGU considers (or at one time
considered) this to be a single journal with a single ISSN 0148-0227,
but sections of the journal are marketed and delivered as separate
products, vis the "journals" web page:

J. Geophys. Res. - Atmos.
ISSN 0148-0227 	Vol. 110, No. D17	 2005 Sep 16
J. Geophys. Res. - Earth Surface
ISSN 0148-0227 	Vol. 110, No. F2	2005 Apr-Jun
J. Geophys. Res. - Oceans
ISSN 0148-0227 	Vol. 110, No. C8	2005 Aug 15
J. Geophys. Res. - Planets
ISSN 0148-0227 	Vol. 110, No. E8	2005 Aug 25
J. Geophys. Res. - Solid Earth
ISSN 0148-0227 	Vol. 110, No. B8	2005 Aug 10
J. Geophys. Res. - Space Phys.
ISSN 0148-0227 	Vol. 110, No. A8	2005 Aug 1

At one time, separate ISSNs were assigned to the sections. AGU
objected to this and had these ISSNs "cancelled".

Our problem with this is how to express, in a library's electronic
holdings profile, that a library has access to only a section of this
journal. We can't do it by title, because a citation to an article
may only have the generic title, without the section- this is the
preferred citation style at AGU. It seems that the only reliable way
to do it would be to examine the volume number; this will be a bit
messy.

My questions are
1. Is it common for libraries to have electronic full-text access to
only some sections of this title?
2. Are there other cases where journal publishers are adamant about
not having separate ISSNs for sections that are sold separately? (We
have been able to handle (not perfectly, alas) the sections of
American Journal of Physiology, which had ISSN confusion issues in
the 70's.)
3. Is there any formal guidance about this practice in the ISSN world?

I've been corresponding with the AGU on this, and I'd be interested
to here what serialists in libraries think about it.

Eric
--

Eric Hellman, President                            Openly Informatics, Inc.
eric@openly.com                                    2 Broad St., 2nd Floor
tel 1-973-509-7800 fax 1-734-468-6216              Bloomfield, NJ 07003
http://www.openly.com/1cate/      1 Click Access To Everything