Access to Electronic Journals,

he UAMS Library currently provides UAMS students and employees with online access to about 2,500 journals. A

BUDGET UPDATE

n a previous article of this newsletter, I reported on the budget situation in the UAMS Library. Two-thirds of our I collections budget is spent on journals, databases and software from two large European conglomerates. Unfortunately, during the past few years these conglomerates have increased the prices for their products more than the usual 10-15 % increases we normally pay for journal subscriptions. I am happy to report that the UAMS Administration has approved a $50,000 increase in the Library’s journal budget for the coming year, which will help us to avoid major cuts in our journal subscriptions for 2004. We will continue to look for good ways to deal with our budget situation, such as looking for alternative sources of funding and working with consortia to get reduced prices for some journal packages. However, these efforts just address the symptoms and not the problem itself, which is the control of scholarly publishing by large for-profit conglomerates which have monopolies on the biomedical publishing market. Some initiatives are attempting to change the process of scholarly publishing itself, such as BioMed Central (BMC). BMC (www.biomedcentral.com) is an independent publishing house which provides online access to peer-reviewed biomedical articles. It publishes journals in a wide range of biomedical subject categories, the journals have editorial boards and peer-review processes similar to those for traditional print journals, the articles are indexed in MEDLINE, and the free BMC journals are availabl