AAAS sells OJCCT & other interesting news ...

A recent issue of_Science_ (v.265:no.5174 (Aug. 12, 1994)) features
several interesting computer and Internet-related articles and
statistics, including a long, informative article on NCSA's Mosaic
and the World Wide Web (B.R. Schatz & J.B. Hardin).  Subscribers
of SERIALST may also be interested in noting a news item regarding
the recent sale of one of the early electronic journals, _The Online
Journal of Current Clinical Trials_ (OJCCT).  A brief summary and
some excerpts that caught my attention are included below.  BTW,
early discussions regarding the development and launching of OJCCT,
dating back to 1991 and 1992, are archived in the SERIALST logs.

---------
According to a recent article in _Science_ (v.265, Aug. 12, 1994),
the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS -
which also publishes _Science_) announced last week that it has
sold the electronic medical journal, _The Online Journal of
Current Clinical Trials_ (OJCCT), to Chapman & Hall, the STM
publisher for the multinational publishing group, The Thomson
Corporation.

The article goes on to note that OJCCT, which was started two
years ago by AAAS and OCLC to "give physicians faster access
to peer-reviewed findings that might improve the practice of
medicine ... needed 5000 subscriptions to break even [and]
reached barely a tenth of that level.  Last fall the AAAS
Board of Directors decided to seek a buyer that could afford
to mount the type of aggressive marketing campaign needed to
make the journal viable."

According to Chapman & Hall's president, Dana Dreibelbis, "the
company will continue to distribute the journal in partnership
with the Dublin, Ohio-based OCLC Online Library Center but that
it intends to use direct mail to 'promote [the journal] heavily
to the medical community.'"

Founding editor, Edward Huth (former longtime editor of _The
Annals of Internal Medicine_), who will be stepping down during
the transition, "thinks the most successful on-line journals
will be those published by small scientific societies that
have 'a natural constituency.'"  .....

For more information, see _Science_, v.265 (Aug. 12, 1994), p. 867.

-- submitted by Birdie MacLennan,
   Serials Coordinator, University of Vermont