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.
Dr. Farhan Siddiq, MD, a neurosurgeon with MU Health Care, recently embarked on a Food and Drug Administration submission project for a National Institutes of Health funded multi-site medical device clinical trial. The trial is looking at a device to be used on patients with chronic subdural hematoma, which is a bruise under the skull that can compress the brain. While the clinical trial includes both researchers at Harvard and University of Texas, it was Dr. Siddiq’s team at MU that was tasked with completing the FDA submission. The submission required a thorough review and summary of information in the literature regarding all uses of the medical device. The team needed to get their hands on and review hundreds of papers quickly to write the summaries and develop the bibliography. With this huge project on the horizon, the research team looked to the Health Sciences Library for assistance.
Suzan Moser, the director of regulatory affairs at the MU Institute for Clinical and Translational Science and a member of the research team for the project, says that contacting the library was natural “From past FDA submissions, I know the benefits of a good medical library and librarian. I asked the Dean of Research’s office in the School of Medicine to recommend someone. She suggested Rachel Alexander, and we are forever grateful,” says Suzan.
Rachel Alexander Research Support Librarian
With Rachel Alexander, the research support librarian at the Health Sciences Library, on board, the team quickly fulfilled the FDA submission requirements. Rachel ran several searches and worked with Dr. Siddiq to pull relevant manuscripts, eventually working with Katy Emerson in the library’s Interlibrary Loan department to get copies of all 250 articles to be reviewed, with the library having access to most of the articles and only borrowing 19 from other libraries. Dr. Siddiq and Rachel further boiled down the list of articles to 158 that they would submit to the FDA. With the final 158 articles, Rachel created bibliographies for the protocol, proposal and literature summary.
In all, searching the literature, pulling the articles, and choosing the articles took about 85 hours and Rachel was there every step of the way. According to Suzan, Rachel spoiled the research team with all of her assistance.
“Rachel’s knowledge about how to find, access, organize and file the publications so all team members could easily use them was most valuable. Her extreme reliability, flexibility and excellent communication skills are most noteworthy,” says Suzan.
If you are embarking on a literature review for a project, whether big (like an FDA submission) or small, consider contacting the Health Sciences Library for a consultation.
Cycle of Success is the idea that libraries, faculty, and students are linked; for one to truly succeed, we must all succeed. The path to success is formed by the connections between University of Missouri Libraries and faculty members, between faculty members and students, and between students and the libraries that serve them. More than just success, this is also a connection of mutual respect, support, and commitment to forward-thinking research.
If you would like tosubmityour own success story about how the libraries have helped your research and/or work, please use the Cycle of Success form.
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.
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).
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 month’s featured article:
“SUMO: From Bench to Bedside“ was co-authored by Dr. Hui-Ming Chang and Dr. Edward T. H. Yeh of the Center for Precision Medicine, Department of Medicine. The article was published in Physiological Reviews (impact factor of 25.588 in 2019).
We are pleased to share that MOBIUS and traditional Interlibrary Loan (ILL) borrowing resumes as of August 3rd. The service may be slower than in past years as most libraries are allowing time to quarantine books and some libraries remain closed or are open with limited staffing.
