...Judy Johnson, UNL [University of Nebraska - Lincoln] libraries coordinator of acquisitions and electronic licensing, said library employees face many challenges when acquiring E-journals because a lot of time is spent negotiating licenses for databases when contract periods are up.
"The process is very labor intensive as the licenses' are usually reworked several times between the publisher and the institution," Johnson said.
The National Information Standards Organization sought to solve this problem with its creation of The Shared E-Resource Understanding, which began its trial period June 20 and seeks to standardize the licensing process between libraries and journal publishers. The program could go a long way towards streamlining the acquisitions process, Johnson said.
The university has also experimented with open access publishing options such as BioMed [Central] and The Digital Commons....
The BioMed [Central] publication, sponsored by the college of biological sciences, is an open source journal partly funded by the university. Alan Kamil, chairman of the biological sciences department, said the university will sometimes help junior faculty members to publish their work. The publishing process can cost anywhere between $1,500 and $3,000 per article, and even with membership discounts sold by the publishing companies to the UNL, the cost of open access publishing remains high.
The price of scholarly journals rises by an average of 7 to 9 percent per year, and the state-aided materials budget for library materials has not increased during the past six or seven years, Busch said.
This makes it difficult for the library to fund open access projects and move away from the subscription business model....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/24/2007 01:57:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
