Bringing JRMES back to life

[mcbishop]

As someone who is a university librarian in my day job, and a serials librarian to boot, I implore to adopt the print and digital model. It will ultimately give the most flexibility and in the (very) long run it is the only real method of preservation. I can go to the shelf in my collection and take down a 300 year old book and read it, who knows if a electronic version will be available in 300 years time from now? I understand your concerns about dead trees and I share them* but if your really want to ensure the best chance at preservation, then distributed paper copies of JRMES in university libraries throughout the world is probably your best bet.

The hybrid is my favoured model too but it is the trickiest to fund. When I worked in a medical library after I left school we had 500-year-old books and that was the first time I came across the notion that older books stand a better chance of surviving than more recent ones, paradoxically.

*I curate a botanical library which specializes in temperate zone trees.

So they chop them down in order that you can read about how they've all been chopped down? Weird. Luckily, sustainable planting means more trees are supposed to be planted than are felled. Still weird, though ;-)

Mike Bishop