Editor's Notes

Expanded Electronic Access to Computer Music Journal

We are pleased to announce that back issues of Computer Music Journal are being made available in electronic form, and that the Journal can be accessed electronically through more channels than before.

The electronic publication of Computer Music Journal commenced with Volume 23, Number 1 (Spring 1999). Until now, earlier issues were obtainable only in hard copy, if at all. (A number of older issues are unavailable in hard copy, the surplus stock having been sold out.) Fortunately, most of the issues back to Volume 1, Number 1 (February 1977) will be available in electronic form. At press time, MIT Press was finalizing arrangements with a corporate sponsor to help digitize hard-copy back issues of various journals, including Computer Music Journal. Like the recent issues of Computer Music Journal, the back issues will be formatted as Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) files, which can be viewed within a Web browser equipped with the free Adobe Acrobat Reader plug-in. The digitization of the back issues will involve not only scanning the hard copy, but also performing optical character recognition (OCR) on the resulting bitmaps. Within the PDF files, the OCR text will underlie the corresponding scanned pages, making the text searchable via Acrobat's Find button. The digitization of all issues of the Journal is expected to be completed by the end of 2001; please check http://mitpress.mit.edu/CMJ for up-to-date information. We expect that readers will welcome this new, convenient source of back issues.

Originally, the sole venue for accessing the electronic version of Computer Music Journal was through the Electronic Collections Online (ECO) gateway of the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC). Individual subscribers are now recommended to access the Journal through CatchWord Ltd.'s Internet publishing services. For instructions, visit http://mitpress.mit.edu/ journals/COMJ/e-access.html. As before, subscribers to the hard-copy Journal have free access to the electronic version. In addition, subscribers can reach the Journal from several other electronic journal platforms, including SwetsnetNavigator, Ebsco Online, and Information Quest. Computer Music Journal has also been added to the Project Muse database (http://muse.jhu.edu), a collaboration of various academic publishers through which hundreds of libraries obtain institutional subscriptions to scholarly journals.

Finally, MIT Press is one of a substantial group of publishers participating in the CrossRef reference linking service (http://www.crossref.org). Through this service, which is free to readers, a researcher can click on a reference citation in an electronic journal and immediately go to a page on the corresponding publisher's Web site showing a full bibliographical citation of the article, and, in most cases, the abstract. Subscribers to that publication can then immediately visit the full text, while others will receive information on accessing it via subscription, document delivery, or pay-per-view. MIT Press plans for reference citations in the electronic version of Computer Music Journal to be outfitted with this linking mechanism by the time you read this.

--Douglas Keislar

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