In this issue:

The Director's Report: Computer Education Ctr and Renovation Update

PDA Support

New Proxy Service -
EZ Proxy

Library Classes on Demand

Pubmed Update

Open Access Update and UCONN's BiomedCentral Membership

Web Watcher:
Medical Entomology and Parasitology

New Drug Database: Epocrates Rx Online

Journal Cancellations for 2004

New Books in the Library

Books in Print Online and
Ulrich's Periodical's Directory Online

Update Archives

Open Acess Update and UCONN's Biomedcentral Membership by Arta Dobbs, M.S.L.S. Collection Management Librarian

The University of Connecticut’s Homer Babbidge Library and L.M. Stowe Library have renewed their joint institutional membership in BioMedCentral, an open access publisher, for another year. This means that all faculty, researchers, students and staff at UCONN can once again, reap the benefits of publishing research articles in an open access journal without paying the usual $500 article processing charge. This is true regardless of the number of papers you publish.

During the previous membership year, 16 articles were published in 8 BMC journals by UCONN faculty, including 3 from UCHC faculty. The publishing journals chosen by faculty include, BMC Bioinformatics, BMC Genomics, BMC Neuroscience, BMC Pediatrics, Genome Biology, BMC Women’s Health, International Journal of Health Geographics, and Reproductive Biology and Endocrinology.

BioMedCentral hosts over 100 journals with biomedical content, of which, 52 journals are now indexed in Medline. 22 journals are being indexed by ISI ‘s WebofScience for citation tracking, with 10 titles already having impact factors. The articles published within these journals are being read by UCHC users in significant numbers, with 974 PDF files downloaded and 2141 full text accesses from July 2003 to July 2004.

Readers who are interested in learning some details about the Open Access Movement are encouraged to go to the web page : Timeline of the Open Access Movement, formerly called the Timeline of the Free Online Scholarship Movement. This web page is produced by Peter Suber, a professor at Earlham College and a leading advocate for the open access movement. Dr. Suber also publishes a weblog : Open Access News : News from the open access movement, where he posts daily on the happenings in the movement. The most recent and very important news to keep track of, is the July 14, 2004 action by the U.S. House of Representatives Appropriations Committee, which placed an important provision in the NIH FY2005 budget. The provision recommends that NIH provide free public access to research articles resulting from NIH-funded research. Researchers whose published work results from NIH funding will be most affected by this provision.

The University of Connecticut’s Homer Babbidge Library has produced a detailed web page concerning the crisis in scholarly publishing and it is worth every scholars time to become acquainted with current scholarly communication issues.