From the Library Director:

In the Sept/Oct issue of this newsletter I wrote about some of the changes taking place in the scholarly communication process, and in this article I will review just a few of the initiatives that are addressing the issues involved in the changes.

The (NIH) National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central (www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov) project includes the archiving of electronic journals and providing free access to them. All material in PubMed Central will be contributed by journals currently indexed by a major abstracting or indexing service, or journals with three or more research grant holders from major funding agencies on their editorial boards. PubMed Central began accepting journal articles in January of 2000, and is growing steadily.

Another initiative is the Create Change initiative sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries, which attempts to educate scholars about the issues involved in scholarly communication and to encourage them to take action to make changes happen. The Create Change website (www.arl.org/create/librarians/intro/aboutcc.html ) gives an excellent overview of the issues involved in the scholarly communication process and gives suggestions for ways to foster change. Some of the strategies for change include the following:

• shifting control of scholarly publication away from commercial publishers and back to scholars;
• influencing scholarly publishers to embrace as their first goal the widest possible dissemination of scholarly information and to abide by pricing policies and practices that are friendly to scholars and libraries;
• creating alternatives to commercial scholarly publications, both competitive alternative journals in more affordable electronic formats and programs that make scholarly research more directly available to scholars; and
• fostering changes in the faculty peer review system that will promote greater availability of scholarly research: these changes might include both movement away from quantity and toward quality as a criterion for tenure and promotion, and full acknowledgement of electronic publication as a means of communicating research.

Scholars can help regain control of the scholarly communication process by:

• encouraging discussion of issues on campus, including the addition of electronic publications in Promotion & Tenure documents and the development of campus intellectual property policies
• encouraging their professional societies to choose competitive publishers
• modifying contracts signed with publishers to regain personal control of copyright
• refusing to work as an editor for, or to submit articles to, very expensive journals.

At the UAMS Library, we are trying to do whatever we can to help support these initiatives. We are also working on a more basic level with local and regional initiatives which will help provide better access to information for our users. We are active participants in the South Central Academic Medical Libraries consortium, which is composed of 14 academic medical libraries in a five-state area, through which we get discounted prices for MDConsult, Academic Ideal full-text journals, and other products, and which provides us with free document delivery of items owned by the other member libraries. We also actively participate in the ARKLink consortium, composed of the 47 public and private academic libraries in the state, which is trying to improve our resource sharing mechanisms within the state and is negotiating group discounts for electronic databases and full-text journals. Within the Library, we are improving access to information by:

• purchasing subscriptions to journals in electronic instead of print format when possible and providing remote access to these products from on- and off-campus
• streamlining our interlibrary loan procedures to provide faster delivery of needed items, including electronic delivery of journal articles directly to a requestor's desktop.

We will continue to support efforts to improve the scholarly communication process on the international, national and regional levels, and to improve our local services in order to provide all of our users with more convenient access to information at the point-of-need.

Mary L. Ryan