This association is comprised of the libraries serving the accredited U.S. and Canadian medical schools belonging to or affiliated with the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC).
As was the case in previous surveys, our collections budget lags behind our peer libraries by over a half a million dollars. Our aspirational peers* have about 4 times more money to spend on collections than we do.
In the 1971 MUtation, the yearbook from the School of Medicine, one of our librarians noticed that Dr. Dan Longo was listed as winning an award during Health Sciences Research Day that year. You may recognize Dr. Dan Longo as one of the authors (along with Dr. Anthony Fauci!) of Harrison’s Internal Medicine. We were able to find this information about Dr. Longo all because the yearbook was digitized in MOSpace. Digitizing your work makes it easier for others to find your work.
Are you presenting at Health Sciences Research Day? Add your poster to MOspace to help boost your resume.
MOspace is the freely available online repository for scholarship and other works by University of Missouri faculty, students, and staff.
You retain copyright, and we provide access.
Once items are submitted, the platform can provide statistics like number of downloads, and from which countries.
Currently, all Health Sciences Research Day posters in MOspace have a total of 39,061 downloads from over 100 countries worldwide. That’s up from 14,951 from last year.
Interested in seeing the worldwide impact of your research? Submit your poster using our online form today.
You can further your impact by signing up for an ORCID ID at ORCID.org.
This week is Open Access Week! Open Access Week, a global event now entering its tenth year, is an opportunity for the academic and research community to continue to learn about the potential benefits of Open Access, to share what they’ve learned with colleagues, and to help inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research.
Recently we asked Dr.Julie Kapp, MPH, PhD, FACE, Associate Professor at the School of Medicine why she considers open access when publishing her research.
I published open access because anyone can access the paper, regardless of institutional affiliation or journal subscriptions. There is a demonstrated citation advantage. Open access also facilitates broader diffusion and dissemination of your ideas inside and outside the academic community. That means it is more accessible to journalists and bloggers who may write about your work. And isn’t the purpose of science to have a broader societal benefit? Open access allows anyone with an interest to learn about your work.
Why was it important despite the fee to move your article out from behind the paywall? Do you see a benefit to having taken the open access route?
For this particular paper, a lot of the interest comes from the topic and the timing of my paper. Still, it being open access no doubt facilitated its accessibility and circulation. This paper was highlighted in Discover Magazine, The New York Times, Yahoo Lifestyle, Psychology Today, an Australian blog, and the official news broadcast of Israel, among other outlets.
Advice to others?
If you have the funding, I would highly recommend open access. If you do not have the funding, our Departments and Schools/Colleges should consider creating resources tagged for open access requests, if we are to be competitive with top schools.
Each month we provide an overview of University of Missouri authored articles in medicine and related fields as well as a featured article from a School of Medicine author with the highest journal impact factor.
This year, the campus is facing the task of reducing our journal costs by $1.2 million for FY2021, which amounts to a 20% reduction. To stay within our budget, we will need to cancel our “big deals” with Elsevier, Wiley, Springer Nature, Oxford and Sage publishers.
We are taking a data-driven approach to these painful cuts, focusing on maintaining access to as many as possible of the 800+ health sciences journals you viewed at least 100 times in 2019. Journals which cost over $1500 will be subject to additional scrutiny.
In order to maintain access to as many of the heavily used titles as possible, we will need to rely on pay-per-view and interlibrary loan access to articles in lieu of subscriptions for high cost and low use journals. Delivery times will vary from 1 hour to a couple of days.
This process is further complicated by several factors:
The sheer number of the titles owned by these publishers, many with impact factors in the top quartile for their discipline
Subscription cuts at the UM System level this year; our campus stands to lose access to about 900 journals unless we can make room for them in our budget
The lack of pricing transparency from some of these publishers
The cost of these journals often outstrips library budgets, leaving the libraries battling both price increases and revenue stagnation.
“Many libraries are cutting continuing expenditures by cancelling or breaking up journal packages and buying only those titles for which use or demand justifies the price. Others are aggressively renegotiating contracts with publishers to reduce ongoing costs.” [1]
Take a a look at subscription costs of a few journals in the early 1980s vs. what the University of Missouri system pays now.
Do you know the price of the journals you write for and edit? How much did they cost 5 years ago? Contact us if you’d like the price history for a journal, or to learn more about how you can help bring journal prices under control.
Every year MU honors those who have passed through the MU Remembers ceremony. To commemorate the lives of these individuals, a book is chosen for each and added to the Health Sciences Library collection. Bookplates are placed inside each of the books and the students, faculty, and staff honored through this program are listed as honorees on the books’ library catalog records. For more information about our Honor with Books program, click here.
Below is the list of students, faculty, and staff who were honored through the Health Sciences Library.
Each month we provide an overview of University of Missouri authored articles in medicine and related fields as well as a featured article from a School of Medicine author with the highest journal impact factor.
If your article was published within the last few years, there’s a good chance it was in a journal owned by one these four companies: Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, Springer and Taylor & Francis. In the early 1970s, they published 15% of the researched produced in the world*. Today, it’s up to 53% of the world’s research.*
Over the years, these publishing companies have merged and acquired smaller publishers, in an effort to own even more of the journal landscape. The lack of competition allows these companies the ability to charge a high price, often not allowing universities to buy journals outright, instead only letting universities rent journals through subscriptions. Universities often pay millions to rent access to research their own faculty conduct.
The biggest contender in the journal publishing market is Elsevier. With 3,000 journals and publishing nearly half a million articles per year, RELX, the parent company of Elsevier, had revenues of US $9.8 billion in 2019. Elsevier’s profits account for about 34% of RELX’s total profits.
You can read more about these oligopolies (market shared by a small number of producers or sellers) and how they are contributing to the unaffordability of journals in the Vox article The War to Free Science.
*This percentage includes Elsevier, Wiley-Blackwell, Springer, Taylor & Francis, and American Chemical Society
“The industry built to publish and disseminate scientific articles — companies such as Elsevier and Springer Nature — has managed to become incredibly profitable by getting a lot of taxpayer-funded, highly skilled labor for free and affixing a premium price tag to its goods.” (1)
In order for universities to access this research, they are often required to purchase subscriptions with a hefty price tag. Universities worldwide spend millions per year so faculty can download and read their own work and that of their colleagues. Since these journals are behind university paywalls, the only option for members of the tax-paying public to gain access is for them to purchase individual articles. That can be pricey when articles may cost $20-$50 each.
Pay more, get less every year
How much money is at stake? Billions of dollars (2). Every year universities struggle to keep up with price increases to journal subscription packages that are far above annual inflation. Since subscription prices are rising much faster than library budgets, collections cuts are necessary.
Universities are fighting back
Many universities have established or are currently looking into establishing programs to assist in the transition of journals from the subscription model to open access. Open Access is the free, immediate, online availability of research articles coupled with the rights to use these articles fully in the digital environment. Open access is the needed modern update for the communication of research that fully utilizes the Internet for what it was originally built to do—accelerate research. Accelerated research means increased return on investment, increased potential contributors, increased audience and collaborators, and increased access for the public. (3).
