TULIP is a cooperative research project testing system for networked delivery and use of journals, performed by Elsevier and nine Universities in the USA. The participants set three objectives at the outset:

Technical

To determine the technical feasibility of networked distribution to and across institutions with varying levels of sophistication in their technical infrastructure. "Networked distribution" means sending the information both across the national Internet and over campus networks to the desktops of students and faculty. Elsevier will deliver the journal information to participating universities in standard formats. The universities will incorporate the information in local prototype or operational systems. A wide variety of delivery alternatives, search and retrieval systems and print-on-demand options will be compared.

Organizational and economic

To understand, through the implementation of prototypes, alternative costing, pricing, subscription and market models that may be "viable" in electronic distribution scenarios; comparing such models with existing print-then- distribute models; and understanding the role of campus organizational units under such scenarios. The overall goal is to reduce the unit cost of information delivery and retrieval. "Viable" means economically and functionally acceptable to all parties.

User behaviour

To study reader usage patterns under different distribution (technical, organizational and economic) situations. Improvement in the functionality of the information, whether as to article structure or retrieval tools, will also be considered. Certain data will be collected uniformly at all sites for analysis in the aggregate and for comparison among different systems.

•    University of California (all campuses)
• Berkeley
• Davis
• Irvine
• Los Angeles
• Riverside
• Santa Barbara
• Santa Cruz
• San Diego
• San Francisco
•  Carnegie Mellon University(Pittsburgh, PA)
•  Cornell University (Ithaca, NY)
•  Georgia Institute of Technology(Atlanta, GA)
•  University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, MI)
•  Massachusetts Institute of Technology(Cambridge, MA)
•  University of Tennessee (Knoxville, TN)
•  Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University(Blacksburg, VA)
•  University of Washington(Seattle, WA)

The participating universities have in common strength in the physical and engineering sciences. In looking within these disciplines for a target area, we wanted a field in which the researchers were comfortable with computer applications and had a higher than average installed base of workstations. An obvious choice might have been computer science itself, but we felt these users would be so atypical in their computer facility as to make it hard to generalize results to other disciplines. Materials science provided a field in which there was both a sufficiently large corpus of frequently-cited material within one publishing company and interested faculties. Therefore 83 journal titles were chosen from the collection of Elsevier  journal titles.

Project Manager
Jaco Zijlstra (The Netherlands),
Project Leader
Karen Hunter (USA)
Technical Coordinator
Paul Mostert (The Netherlands)