Budget Update

In a previous article of this newsletter, I reported on the budget situation in the UAMS Library. Two-thirds of our collections budget is spent on journals, databases and software from two large European conglomerates. Unfortunately, during the past few years these conglomerates have increased the prices for their products more than the usual 10-15% increases we normally pay for journal subscriptions. I am happy to report that the UAMS Administration has approved a $50,000 increase in the Library’s journal budget for the coming year, which will help us to avoid major cuts in our journal subscriptions for 2004.

We will continue to look for good ways to deal with our budget situation, such as looking for alternative sources of funding and working with consortia to get reduced prices for some journal packages. However, these efforts just address the symptoms and not the problem itself, which is the control of scholarly publishing by large for-profit conglomerates which have monopolies on the biomedical publishing market. Some initiatives are attempting to change the process of scholarly publishing itself, such as BioMed Central (BMC). BMC (www.biomedcentral.com) is an independent publishing house which provides online access to peer-reviewed biomedical articles. It publishes journals in a wide range of biomedical subject categories, the journals have editorial boards and peer-review processes similar to those for traditional print journals, the articles are indexed in MEDLINE, and the free BMC journals are available online through PubMed. Six articles written by UAMS faculty were published in BMC during the past 14 months.

While some BMC journals are available for free, others require a nominal annual subscription fee. In addition to subscription fees, the other major source of support for BMC is a $500 per article publishing fee that authors pay to have their articles published. Because publishing in BMC is an important way to help provide inexpensive access to scholarly information, the Library will purchase an institutional membership in BioMed Central effective July 1, 2003. The institutional membership will allow UAMS authors to avoid the $500 per article publishing fee, and will allow the Library to receive a 15% discount on subscriptions to those BMC journals that are not free. The cost of the institutional subscription is usually $4,650 for an institution the size of UAMS, but because we are subscribing with some of the other members of our regional health sciences library consortium, we will receive a 10% discount.

In another effort to control costs and stay within the current budget, the Library will start charging for printing from the computers in the Library in August, 2003. We were reluctant to implement a charge, but the cost of paper, toner, and printers is too great for us to continue totally subsidizing printing costs. Also, much paper is wasted on copies that are not picked up from the printers or are thrown in the trash, and we think charging will cut down on the waste. The cost will be the same as for photocopies (10 cents), and the vendacards that work with the photocopiers can be used to pay for prints from the computers. Information can also be saved to personal CDs or floppy discs instead of being printed on paper.

Mary L. Ryan,
Director