The University of British Columbia

Last year's project was well accepted by the University community. Print titles from these publishers and aggregators were discontinued as of January 2004:

The Library continues to be part of these endeavors to investigate new methods of scholarly publishing:

• ARL SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition): UBC Library is an institutional member.
• Berkeley Electronic Press: UBC subscribes to these titles.
• BioMedCentral: UBC is an institutional member and subscribes to the Biology Collection.
• Public Knowledge Project: UBC Library has provided support to this project.
• Public Library of Science (PLoS)

The Library also supports traditional publishers because users expect the Library to hold or provide online access to the important titles in their fields. For 2003/2004, the Library's expenditures were:

This total is equivalent to purchasing 9 attractive properties on the west side of Vancouver each year!
Prices for individual titles can be inappropriately high. See Cornell's stickershock site for examples of 5 engineering titles.

You, as researchers, can expand scholarly expression and help move it away from the current model of expensive commercial monopoly in the following ways:

• Keeping up-to-date with developments in open access through Nature's debate on access to the literature.
• Working with your professional societies to encourage them to keep the costs of their journals down.
• Putting pressure on publishers of journals that you edit, especially those from commercial publishers, to keep costs reasonable.
• Seriously considering publications in not-for-profit online journals, such as BioMedCentral, as valid in reviews for hiring, tenure, and promotion.
• Starting your own online nonprofit journal.
• Understanding cost issues for periodicals.
• Cooperating with others, such as the UBC Library, to establish a UBC institutional repository (digital collection that captures and preserves the intellectual output of a university community):
  • More information