Many readers know I am a medical librarian, and many readers have met me at Medical Library Association (MLA) activities.  Medical libraries are valued for making health information accessible, organized, and useful,  and one prominent role for academic and hospital libraries is the collection management role:  providing campus-wide institutional access that can tempt and often succeed in influencing clinicians or researchers to drop their individual print or electronic subscriptions.

During the last decade, on a large campus like mine, there might be hundreds of individual personal and department journal titles that were cancelled  in favor of a single, library managed  electronic subscription.  It is no secret that the centralized role that medical libraries have played as the institutional subscription of record has also produced an ongoing  serials crisis as costs for institutional library subscriptions have expanded exponentially, as publishers struggle to adopt their business model to the reality of fewer individual subscriptions .

As the serials crisis looms for library budgets,  researchers around the world have increasingly recognized that in the environment of electronic publishing and knowledge distribution,  the frequency that other researchers can access and cite your work depends on the consistency of access to your published research.  If  libraries trim their subscriptions in the process of the cost cutting demanded, institutional repositories and open access journals become attractive alternatives for authors.

Eventually, medical libraries themselves recognize the role that open access journals might play in their subscription and budgeting process.  Last spring , an MLA Ad Hoc Committee for Advocating Scholarly Communications developed a survey focusing on the impact of open access initiatives on journal collection development decisions. The survey gathered data about cancellations of journals that have open or public access content. Results could serve as a basis for future study. When the widely distributed survey closed on June 18, 2010, a total of 222 respondents had participated. As the survey was not limited to MLA members, the results present a broader statement about medical library opinion in general.

The results of this survey have just been published in MLA News November/December 2010, Volume 50, Issue 10 (available to MLA membership with MLA ID login).   Fortunately, you can read the report and analysis on MLAnet.

On June 4th the University of California Library System issued a very public complaint about Nature Publishing Group‘s proposed triple-digit increase in institutional subscription costs, coupled with a threat of author and editorial boycott by faculty.

On June 24th, David Carlson, the Dean of Library Affairs at Southern Illinois University(SIU), Carbondale, and Associate Dean Connie Poole at the SIU School of Medicine, Springfield, issued a memo to their own faculty regarding the recent NPG controversy with California State University Libraries.

Here are the major recommendations to SIU faculty on the Carbondale and Springfield campuses, if you don’t have time to read the entire memo:

• Be aware of the financial value of the work you contribute when you write, review, and edit articles.
• Whenever possible, choose to publish in journals with equitable business models – open-access journals, or those with reasonably priced subscriptions.
• Assert your rights as an author. Negotiate with publishers for better control of and broader access to your published work through an author addendum such as the Scholar’s Copyright Addendum (http://scholars.sciencecommons.org/).
• Place a copy of your work in SIU’s digital repository, OpenSIUC, and encourage your colleagues to do the same. This will not only be a positive contribution, but will advance the visibility, impact, and reach of your research.
• This past year, the SIU Faculty Senate and Graduate Council endorsed a resolution for faculty to support Open Access. A second resolution called for faculty to “grant SIUC permission to make his or her scholarly journal articles… openly accessible in OpenSIUC.” Support this effort and provide your permission when you are surveyed in the Fall.

Joining the Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry as a fully funded, foundation supported open access journal, the Beilstein-Institut, a non-profit foundation located in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, has just formally announced the launch of the Beilstein Journal of Nanotechnology.  The Editor-in-Chief is Professor Thomas Schimmel, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.

The Beilstein Journal of Nanotechnology publishes peer-reviewed Full Research Papers, Preliminary Communications, Reviews, Book Reports and Commentaries. It also plans to publish thematic series on topical issues of nanoscience and nanotechnology and  intends to cover both fundamental and applied research, including aspects of chemistry, physics and biology as well as materials science and engineering.  Beilstein provides its own unique platform for rapid publication and quality peer review without publication charges. All articles will be freely accessible.

This is a great example of a multidisciplinary area of research and discovery with broad implications for translational medicine.   There are over 15,000 articles in Pubmed with the MeSH heading nanotechnology.  There are both commercial and open access specialty journals focusing on nanotechnology and nanobiology, but the appearance of noted German publisher with a well-respected editorial staff, together with the Beilstein Foundation seal of approval, will probably set up  a period of nano-journal merger and competitive incentive.  Nature Nanotechnology will not go gently into the night.  But they do charge There is a charge of $540 for the first colour figure and $270 for each additional colour figure. We like competition!

An objective summary of  EBSCO journal subscription price records for academic medical journals (2005-2009 Journal Price History) shows an average 40% increase for the past five years.

Last year, the Medical Library community issued a Statement on the Global Economic Crisis and its Impact on Health Sciences Library Collections which called to both publisher and public attention to “the cost of STM (scientific, technical and medical) journals has risen disproportionately higher than other fields, and certainly higher than the vast majority of budget increases in health sciences libraries… the purchasing power and flexibility to build diverse collections suited to institutional needs have steadily eroded in health sciences libraries.”

Publishers seemed to have heard the distress in their customer base.  Many biomedical journal publishers have provided assurances that there will be no annual price increases in 2010.

In the U.K., where green repository access is seen as a sensible long range investment, the system of paid subscription to knowledge is known as toll access:

One model of Gold OA is a direct solicitation to a potential author that a one time up front fee will insure open electronic access to their accepted research article.  Wiley Interscience, a successful publisher of journals and related biomedical content, created a recent “experimental” program for more than 280 Wiley-Blackwell journals called OnlineOpen.  Details that authors must consider are found in an FAQ document.  You can see the order form here.  Oh, by the way, it is a flat fee of $3,000, and some of your grant funding agencies may pay for it.   Also, certain journals participate,  and in the merger of the Wiley and Blackwell journal publishing operations, the process of application for OnlineOpen is distinct.

Authors for either a Wiley or Blackwell biomedical journal normally submit  an exclusive license form (ELF), which is available from  the editorial office.   Here are the Blackwell and Wiley Copyright Transfer forms.

Most of the time it is rather difficult to know or figure out how much a library here or elsewhere pays per year to access electronic journals that are not open access.  We must provide some type of credit to Wiley Interscience for providing a 2010 journal list price document on the web.  Wiley also gets credit for supporting the NIH Public Access Mandate by posting the accepted version in the NIH archive within the 12-month requirement.

Of course, the UKPMC, a UK repository version of the US PubMed Central,  requires deposit within six months for a consortium of UK funding organizations.