Increasing access to medical and scientific e-journals
09 March 2011
The 12 month pilot agreement will ensure equitable access to a wider range of electronic journals for all staff within the CUHP organisations via the library services.
Currently both the University of Cambridge and the NHS purchase access to electronic journals separately, and licence conditions imposed by the suppliers mean that most staff are restricted to content subscribed to by the sector which employs them. Members of the University of Cambridge use the "Raven" password system for remote access to a wide range of e-resources that are not available remotely to NHS staff, while NHS staff use the "Athens" password system for remote access to an overlapping but significantly different set of resources purchased through both national and East of England NHS consortia and not available to academic staff.
The increased access is part of a national agreement between the libraries of the five Academic Heath Science Centre universities, JISC Collections, the UK academic community e-content procurement and negotiation service and some of the leading publishers of e-content. This will allow the University of Cambridge to extend to its partner NHS organisations access to the content it already obtains on subscription from the participating publishers.
The resources being made available for CUHP include all the Nature Publishing Group journals, a package of 2,000 titles from Springer, and (soon) Elsevier's "Science Direct" package of 2,500 journals and a set of databases from Thomson Reuters including Web of Science and Journal Citation Reports. A limited amount of this content is already available to NHS staff via other subscriptions.
"This is a really exciting development. Electronic journals and other e-resources are increasingly replacing the printed equivalents as the medium of choice for accessing the biomedical and healthcare literature. Their popularity is largely due to the fact that users have the ability to access them remotely, using a password, from workplace or home. This pilot will run to the end of 2011 and will give both parties the ability to assess the benefits this type of agreement brings," said Peter Morgan, Head of Medical & Science Libraries, Cambridge University Library.
Over the course of the year all parties will work together to review the impact on usage, administration, and licensing requirements arising from the pilot. An interim report will be produced in the third quarter of 2011.
