« February 2007 | Main | September 2007 »
August 03, 2007
Library drops BioMed Central's Open Access membership
After careful consideration, the Cushing/Whitney Medical and the Science Libraries have decided to end their support for BioMed Central's Open Access publishing effort. The libraries previously covered 100% of the author article charges which allowed these papers to be made freely available worldwide via the Internet at time of publication. This experiment in Open Access publishing has proved unsustainable. The libraries' support will continue for all Yale-authored articles currently in submission to BioMed Central as of July 27, 2007.
The libraries’ BioMedCentral membership represented an opportunity to test the technical feasibility and the business model of this OA publisher. While the technology proved acceptable, the business model failed to provide a viable long-term revenue base built upon logical and scalable options. Instead, BioMedCentral has asked libraries for larger and larger contributions to subsidize their activities. Starting with 2005, BioMed Central article charges cost the libraries $4,658, comparable to a single biomedicine journal subscription. The cost of article charges for 2006 then jumped to $31,625. The article charges have continued to soar in 2007 with the libraries charged $29,635 through June 2007, with $34,965 in potential additional article charges in submission.
As we deal with unprecedented increases in electronic resources, we have had to make hard choices about which resources to keep. At this point we can no longer afford to support the BioMedCentral model.
We believe in the widest possible access to scholarly research supported by workable business models and should BioMedCentral develop a viable economic model which allows them to more equitably share costs across all interested stakeholders, we would consider renewing our financial support.
Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions or concerns about this policy.
Ann Okerson, Associate University Librarian for Collections, Yale University Library
R. Kenny Marone, Director, Medical Library
David Stern, Director, Science Libraries
Posted by dstern at 11:03 AM | Comments (2)
August 01, 2007
SciFinder Scholar 2007
The new improved SciFinder Scholar 2007 for both PCs and Mac OS X (10.2 and higher) is now available.
The software is available from the usual library web site -- http://www.library.yale.edu/science/help/scifinder/sfsdownload.html
The new features include:
* Combine answer sets.
* Launch a new structure search or refine your current structure search by clicking on any structure in an answer set.
* Categorize: sort and evaluate information in your answer sets by creating a histogram for easy analysis.
For more information see http://www.cas.org/products/sfacad/index.html
Posted by dstern at 09:50 AM | Comments (0)