From the Library Director:
Transition from Print to Online Information Resources

The UAMS Library currently provides UAMS students and employees with online access to about 2,500 journals. As the Library continues its transition from ownership of print information resources to the provision of access to online resources, we find ourselves in the midst of a somewhat chaotic situation.

In a print environment, libraries send their list of journal titles to a jobber for renewal and they pay the institutional or library subscription prices listed by the publishers.

In an online environment, libraries must negotiate annually with each major publisher or vendor of the online journals to which they want to provide access. Licensing agreements must be interpreted and eventually signed by the library and the vendor/publisher. Some licensing agreements are very restrictive. For example, some publishers do not want libraries to provide remote online access (from offices, homes, etc.) to their journals, and some licenses restrict libraries from providing interlibrary loans of the articles in the online journals.

The pricing of online journals is much more complicated than pricing for print journals. Publishers/vendors of online journals often sell their products in bundles of titles (also called big deals), rather than selling each journal individually. This can result in libraries having to pay for a package with many titles that they do not want in order to get access to the titles they do want. It also means that libraries may have to pay so much for the packages of online journals from the major publishers that they may not have any money left to spend with smaller journal publishers and for books. Also, titles may be sold to other publishers, resulting in an unexpected change in the content of the packages from year to year or even within a year.

Different libraries often do not pay the same price for online access to journals. Prices for the same online journal packages may vary significantly depending on whether or not the library is purchasing access to a package through a consortium, and how well an individual library negotiated on the prices and terms of the licensing agreements. Also, libraries may be locked into certain prices for online journal packages based on the number of print subscriptions a library originally had with a particular publisher before going online, because the publisher wants a library to commit to spending as much or more for online access than it paid for print access. Some licensing agreements even prohibit librarians from discussing the prices they paid for certain products with other librarians. Negotiating annual licensing agreements for online products is now a very time-consuming and often frustrating process for the Library staff.

Most major biomedical publishers have raised their prices for their online packages an average of 10% or more per year for the past several years. A few publishing conglomerates now control a large proportion of the scientific, technical and medical publishing market, and there is a diminishing amount of competition in the marketplace. The UAMS Library spends two-thirds of its information resources budget on products from just two publishing conglomerates.

In a print environment, journals are checked in, stamped and shelved, and library users come into the Library to obtain access to the journals. In an online environment, access to resources requires a lot of technical work on the part of the Library staff. Records with links to publishers’ servers must be added to the Library’s online catalog and to its website for each online journal title, and Library staff must maintain servers for the online catalog and the website. The library also must run a proxy service to ensure that only UAMS faculty, staff and students can get access to the online resources made available through the Library’s catalog and website. The publishers’ URLs for their journals may change, and each publisher or vendor has different search engines and interfaces, which makes providing access to the journals even more complicated.

The Library provides online interlibrary loan service for journal articles not made accessible directly through the Library’s catalog or website. The ILLiad system allows the Library to receive interlibrary loan requests electronically, receive the full-text of the requested journal articles online, and forward them directly to the requestor’s desktop, usually within 24 hours from receipt of the request. While this system has been a vast improvement over the previous method for providing print copies of articles not owned by the Library, it requires more equipment and software, and a higher level of training and expertise for the interlibrary loan staff.

Although providing online access to journal articles does help make access to information much more convenient, the current system of online scholarly publishing does not take full advantage of the Internet for improving the process of publishing and disseminating information widely. One method being experimented with which attempts to improve the process of scholarly publishing is called open access publishing, which I will write about in my next article.

Mary L. Ryan,
Director