A review of electronic journal acquisition, management, and use in health sciences libraries

Abstract

Purpose: The paper describes patterns of electronic journal usage in health sciences libraries during the past decade.

Method: The paper presents a case study, documenting the pattern of acquisition, management, and usage at the Louis Calder Memorial Library of the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine.

Results: Health sciences journals were early to offer electronic alternatives to print. As a result, health sciences libraries, their patrons, and the public at large were early to embrace the new versions and continue to embrace the significant changes in scholarly communication they enable. Although the patterns of electronic journals among health sciences libraries and other special and academic libraries have similarities, they also have differences. Broad studies of electronic journals in non–health sciences libraries have been published, but a retrospective review of electronic journals in health sciences libraries has not.

INTRODUCTION

Ten years ago, the Louis Calder Memorial Library (LCML) of the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine/Jackson Health System initiated university-wide trials of its first three Internet journals: the British Medical Journal, the Journal of Biological Chemistry, and the New England Journal of Medicine. Currently, the LCML supports access to about 4,500 electronic journals in the health sciences. This growth at the LCML reflects the proliferation of e-journals at many of the nation's academic health sciences libraries (Figure 1) [1] and an ever-growing number of hospitals and hospital systems.

Figure 1.

Total electronic journals added, mean value, 1999–2002, across medical school libraries reporting Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries (AAHSL) statistics

The 1995-to-2004 decade at the LCML divides historically into three periods. The dates of these three periods may be unique to the LCML, but the patterns of each period are not. During 1995 to 1999, acquisition policies, management strategies, and usage reports were initiated and stood side-by-side with those for the print collections. Although an exponential increase in the number of e-journals patrons had access to occurred between 2000 and 2002, the integrity of the print collections was preserved. Beginning in 2003, electronic journals began forging paths of their own. Although articles on some of the patterns of acquisition, management, and usage of e-journals in health sciences libraries have been published and are cited throughout this paper, none was identified on the history of the first decade as a whole.

HISTORICAL REVIEW

1995 to 1999: early acquisitions and management strategies

The first e-journals purchased in 1995, at more than double the cost of their print counterparts, were for the most part journals that were heavily used in print format: the Journal of Biological Chemistry on HighWire Press and 30 leading journals in the clinical and basic sciences in the Ovid Core Biomedical Collection and Ovid Biomedical Collection 2. The first aggregator database purchased in 1997, with the full text of more than 150 health sciences journals, was Health Reference Center Academic. During 1997, all purchased electronic journals were readily accessible university-wide, as were free trials to:

• electronic versions of journals received in print: 6 journals on HighWire Press—Journal of Clinical Investigation, Journal of Experimental Medicine, Journal of Neuroscience, Pediatrics, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Science—as well as 7 journals at individual publisher sites

• 33 journals in the Medicine Online Library on the LINK System from Springer-Verlag

• more than 200 journals in the health sciences accessible via Elsevier's ScienceDirect

• numerous journals published by the American Chemical Society, Cambridge University Press, University of Chicago Press, and Wiley Interscience

By the end of 1998, more than 500 e-journals, of which 200 were unique and not duplicated in the LCML print collections, were accessible as a result of additional trials. During 1997 and 1998, the “typical” full-text, electronic biomedical journal on its publisher's Website:

• had content beginning in 1995 or 1996 in portable document format (PDF)

• was accessible at no charge to patrons from within a specific Internet protocol (IP) domain, with a specific password, or both, based on an institution's print subscription

• saw higher increases in the price of its print counterpart than print subscriptions without “free” access [2]

• was also accessible to anyone for a per-article fee of about $15

• was browsable by volume and issue number

• was searchable, using Boolean operators, by author name and keyword

Many publishers were:

• making articles available in hypertext markup language (HTML) to enhance navigation

• beginning to make archiving arrangements to ensure perpetual online availability

• making progress on adapting digital files originally created for print publication and dissemination

• initiating “online first” programs, whereby articles are available online shortly after their acceptance and well before their appearance in print

• developing Websites where all their e-journals were browsable by title and subject and searchable by title

• expanding their technical support staffs and services and linking capabilities

• beginning to work with journal vendors for procurement

Journal vendors were:

• developing platforms with a common search engine for desktop access to the full text of journals subscribed to in print or electronically by their customers

• creating mechanisms to alert customers of online issues as they became available on the publishers' sites

• working with publishers to initiate programs to handle library orders for electronic journals

Other organizations were working on validation programs to support access by authorized users from outside the IP domain of their campus or institution, such as EZproxy; on alternative access management solutions, such as Shibboleth; and on open uniform resource locator (URL) link resolvers, such as SFX.

A–Z list and cataloging

By March 1997, 3 months after the 1st e-journals were accessible to patrons, the LCML created an alphabetical list of e-journals on its home page. During 1998, the list was expanded to afford access to e-journals by subject and by publisher or aggregator. By May 1999, 319 e-journals indexed for MEDLINE or CINAHL appeared on the LCML's A–Z list, and usage of this site exceeded 1,000 hits per month.

In April 1996, the LCML acquired the WWW Browser component for its online catalog from Innovative Interfaces. This component permitted point-and-click access to an Internet resource, directly from the unique bibliographic record for the resource, for the first time. With this component, the LCML was able to support full bibliographic access to Internet resources, in addition to the title access to e-journals afforded patrons on the A–Z list. In 1998, the LCML began creating a separate bibliographic record for the electronic version of journals for which a University of Miami library had expended funds, including the hundreds of titles that would become available from aggregators. All titles accessible at no additional charge based on a print subscription were originally excluded, because their accessibility was uncertain upon publishers' imposition of fees.

The decision to create a separate bibliographic record for the electronic version of journals for which a print record existed was based on emerging national standards [3] and on the expectation that libraries might not always support both electronic and print versions for all titles. Some libraries at the time added the URL for the electronic version to the bibliographic record of the print version. A separate record enabled the International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) for the e-journal to appear in the bibliographic record for the e-journal, which enabled the LCML to link titles in bibliographic databases, such as MEDLINE, to the online catalog via the ISSN. The separate record decision simplified the choice seven years later to maintain records for e-journals in the LCML online catalog by outsourcing the procurement of MARC records.

Links from bibliographic databases, proxy access, open access, and usage

At the LCML, the first links between MEDLINE and the full image of articles were made possible between the locally mounted Ovid MEDLINE and Ovid Biomedical Collection databases in early 1997. This capability was rapidly embraced by patrons [4], despite some early problematic links due to inconsistencies between information in the MEDLINE citation and corresponding information in the full-text file and delays between the appearance of a citation in MEDLINE and the appearance of the full text in the Ovid Biomedical Collection files.

In April 1999, the LCML acquired the Web Access Management component from Innovative Interfaces to support ready access by patrons from off-campus locations to e-journals restricted by IP domain. In August 1999, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced PubMed Central, “a system to make the results of the world's life sciences research community freely available on the Internet” [5]. Toward the end of 1999, the LCML began capturing usage data for the 1999/2000 fiscal year.

As is evident from the above description of the LCML, the formats, access mechanisms, management strategies, and usage data that exist today for electronic journals in the health sciences were all available by the end of 1999. Although the 1995-to-1999 time period and specific titles acquired might be unique to the LCML, during the second half of the 1990s, other academic health sciences libraries acquired the full-text versions of electronic journals, either as remote and/ or locally loaded files, such as the original Ovid collections; provided access for their patrons to a combination of e-journals through purchase, free trials, free with print, and aggregator databases; developed in-house A–Z lists on their Websites; wrestled with cataloging and proxy access decisions; and provided links between bibliographic databases and the full text on the citation level and the online public access catalog on the title level.

2000 to 2002: period of growth

At the LCML, major growth of e-journals occurred between 2000 and 2002. As can be seen from Figure 2, there was a 750% increase in the number of e-journals accessible in 2002 (2,714), compared to 1999 (319). The main impetus for this increase was the development of an e-journal collection at the university library and the provost's mandate to make all newly acquired e-journals accessible university-wide. The LCML acquired most e-journals based in whole or in part on print subscriptions at the LCML, the University of Miami Library System, or a consortium for approximately 5% to 15% above the list price of the print subscription, plus a fee to access the hundreds of non-subscription titles in the “big deal.” Because many of the new e-journals were unique to the collections of the LCML, an unprecedented 69% increase in the number of unique titles in print and/or electronic formats accessible, from 1,852 in 1999 to 3,137 in 2002, accompanied the growth in e-journals. “At all but the largest academic libraries, collection sizes in the electronic format are significantly larger than they ever were for print” [6].

Figure 2.

Louis Calder Memorial Library (LCML) journal subscriptions, 1999– 2002

Following is a brief synopsis of the cooperative purchases, individual titles, aggregator titles, and open access titles that became available during this period. During 2000, all patrons had ready access to:

• the 24 leading journals at the time, Clinics of North America, and Yearbook series in MD Consult

• the International Digital Electronic Access Library (IDEAL) package of the full text of more than 200 journals in the health sciences published by Academic Press, Churchill Livingstone, and W. B. Saunders, the first cooperative acquisition of the University of Miami Library System

• Springer-Verlag's LINK system, with more than 180 journals in the biomedical sciences, the second University of Miami cooperative purchase

• the university library's first backfile collection, now known as JSTOR I, which provided access to the full text of important journals such as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences retrospectively to 1960

• the university library's EBSCOhost Electronic Journals Service, the first vendor-supported platform for ready access to the full text of the 900 electronic journals subscribed to or on trial by a university library at the time or otherwise accessible university-wide; from the beginning, this platform supported searching the content of 900 full-text journals accessible university-wide, free searches of more than 450,000 articles in the 8,000 electronic journals from 35 publishers then accessible, and the ability to browse the table of contents and abstracts of all 8,000 journals

The year 2001 ushered in the full text of:

• all 1,200 journals then available on the ScienceDirect platform though a consortium purchase

• all Annual Reviews titles and PsycARTICLES through a University of Miami Library System cooperative purchase

• about 100 LCML electronic subscriptions to heavily used titles published by societies and publishers such as Cell Press, Karger, Kluwer, Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, Macmillan, Mary Ann Liebert, Mosby, and Nature Publishing Group

• 200 journals published by Blackwell Science and Munksgaard available on Synergy through a consortium purchase

• 7 biomedical journals on the university library's BioOne subscription

• 10 journals, archived back to 2000, and 54 open access journals published by BioMed Central on PubMed Central Links from the full text to bibliographic databases such as Web of Science, Cambridge Scientific Abstracts, PsycINFO, and BIOSIS were created by the university library and to PubMed and the MEDLINE database at Ovid Technologies by the LCML in 2001. During 2002:

• the exponential growth in the LCML's e-journal collection ended with the last “big deal” of science, technology, and medicine (STM) journals acquired through a consortium purchase, the titles published by Wiley Interscience

• health sciences titles in the aggregator databases acquired by the university library—such as ProQuest Research Library, Academic Search Elite, Expanded Academic ASAP, and others—were added to the LCML's A–Z list and online catalog, as were the growing number of open access journals on PubMed Central and BioMed Central

Although entering into cooperative purchase agreements with other University of Miami libraries and state and regional consortia was the primary reason for the exponential growth in the e-journal collection at the LCML, other academic health sciences libraries during the years surrounding the new millennium took advantage of the “big deals” offered by STM publishers. The same is true for the many aggregator databases of full-text journals that were compiled and offered for sale at this time. Involvement in buying consortia allows an academic health sciences library to add significantly to its support of the information needs of its campus without large increases in its collection budget. The actual costs for the library to participate in consortium packages are insignificant compared to potential subscription costs. Despite criticisms of the “big deal,” they can be a “good deal” for libraries that work together through consortia [7].

Usage and distance education programs

Use of e-journals by the University of Miami, as measured by the number of PDF and HTML articles opened by patrons, increased approximately 185% between 1999 and 2002. Usage data for the journals in Table 1 are available for the 1999/00-to-2001/02 period and reflect this increase. Usage data at the publisher or aggregator site were available for many journals and most publisher packages beginning in 2000/01 and complied with Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources (COUNTER) by 2003/04. The number of PDF and HTML articles opened during this period in the health sciences titles supported in whole or in part by the LCML increased by 59%, from 273,659 in 2000/ 01 to 436,090 in 2001/02. These data were obtained by the author at the publisher or aggregator site whenever possible. However, the total usage of e-journals during this period of growth increased by more than 1,700% as measured by the number of hits to the LCML's A– Z list. Total usage includes browsing tables of contents, viewing abstracts, and searching a site by author and/ or text word.

Table 1 Usage of Louis Calder Memorial Library (LCML) electronic journals, 1999/2000–2001/02

The rapid spread of distance education programs at academic medical centers during this period, if not attributable to, was certainly enabled by remote access to e-journals and accounted for some of their increased use. One academic health sciences library gave meeting the needs of distance education programs as the reason for the introduction of e-journals in the late 1990s [8]. At the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine and the LCML, these programs ranged from geographically remote campuses in neighboring counties for undergraduate medical education begun in 2001, to Web-based instructional software such as Blackboard, and coursepack programs, such as XanEdu.

The major growth in the number, acceptance, and use of e-journals, which began at the LCML and at other academic health sciences libraries during the years surrounding the new millennium [1], saw comparable increases in the previously described A–Z list, cataloging, linking, and proxy access strategies. However, the most significant changes occasioned by their growth followed this time period.

2003 to 2004: new paths forged

Decreases in use of print, interlibrary loan, and attendance

Table 2 documents the dramatic decline in print use between 1995 and 2004 for the journals most frequently used at the LCML in 1995, as well as the overall 88% decrease in print use and 83% decrease in print use per title during this decade. De Groote and Dorsch have documented that print journal use decreases significantly with the introduction of online journals, regardless of whether a journal was available only in print or both online and in print [9]. Obst has found that during the first 2 years of the introduction of online journals, journals available in print and online lost 30% of their print usage, while journals available only in print lost 46% of their usage, and online usage outstripped that of print by a factor of 10 [10]. The steady nationwide decline in the number of copies done on library copier machines, which began at the LCML in 1999/2000, further documents the significant decrease in use of the print collections (Figure 3).

Table 2 Usage of current five years of LCML print journals, 1995 and 2004 versus 2003/04 online usage

Figure 3.

LCML photocopies, 1999/2000–2003/04

As shown in Table 3, interlibrary loan activity decreased for the first time at the LCML and nationwide as a result of the significant increase in the number of unique, accessible e-journal titles and a decrease in the number of print subscriptions. The decreases in interlibrary loan activity were evident in 2001/02, the 2nd year of the period of growth in e-journals at the LCML, in both items filled and items borrowed. The 33% decrease in the number of loans filled in the 1999/2000-to-2003/04 period was largely attributable to the accessibility of e-journals nationwide. The 54% decrease in items borrowed was attributable solely to the accessibility and acceptance by LCML patrons of e-journals.

Table 3 LCML interlibrary loan activity, 1999/2000–2003/04

The pattern of decreasing attendance in health sciences libraries (Figure 4) [1] can also be attributed to ready remote access to the full text of unprecedented numbers of electronic journals and the significant decline in print journal usage. A recent study documents this decline, showing that there are more than 5 remote users for each in-house user at academic health sciences libraries where the user population consists of faculty, staff, and research fellows [11]. Due to the availability of 45 state-of-the-art publicly accessible workstations beginning in 2001/02, attendance did not decline at the LCML until 2003/04 with the first cancellation of current print subscriptions to 230 important journals.

Figure 4.

Gate count, mean value, 1998/99–2002/03, across medical school libraries reporting AAHSL statistics

Cancellation of print subscriptions and archival concerns

Prior to 2003, the growth in the number of e-journals at the LCML occurred side-by-side with the maintenance of traditional services for their print counterparts. Indeed, prior to 2003, publishers marketed e-journals based in whole or in part on a library's or a consortium's existing print subscriptions and priced them as a percentage over and above the list prices of the print subscriptions. As patrons began to accept, then enjoy, and then expect the many advantages of desktop access to the scholarly literature in the health sciences, neither they nor librarians as a group were willing to trust or rely on the electronic versions exclusively for perpetual access, and print subscriptions were continued. Acquiring and maintaining both print and electronic collections became economically challenging at the LCML in 2003, while policies for perpetual access to e-journals emerged from some publishers. According to a 2004 Council on Library and Information Resources report, “the failure to resolve the issue of responsibility for archiving has hindered the transition to electronic journals” [6].

During 2003 and 2004, the LCML cancelled approximately 500 print subscriptions, based largely on their availability in electronic format and reasonably sound perpetual access policies, including provision of the data in electronic format if no longer available from the publisher, the ability to purchase back volumes in electronic format, and/or the availability of back volumes on reliable platforms such as JSTOR, BioOne, and PubMed Central.

The 1st publishers with acceptable perpetual access policies identified by the LCML were Elsevier and Wiley Interscience in 2003, followed by Springer-Verlag in 2004. Backfile collections available for purchase were identified for the American Chemical Society journals, the American Physiological Society journals, Annual Reviews, and others. Reliable back file platforms were identified for society publications, such as the journals published by the American Society for Microbiology. With perpetual access policies and backfile collections, the “storage and maintenance of electronic collections have become the work of the publisher” and not the librarian [6] for the most part. When the LCML cancelled its 1st print journals and added open access titles to its A–Z list in 2003/04, e-journal usage, which had been steadily increasing since 1999/2000, experienced a 20% increase over 2002/03 (Figure 5), while the overlap in journals in both print and electronic versions, which had decreased to 29% (1,004 titles) in 2003, decreased to 14% (540 titles) in 2004.

Figure 5.

Usage of LCML electronic journals, 1999/2000–2003/04

Open access, public access, data mining, and institutional repositories

The hundreds of open access titles added to the A–Z list appear on the Directory of Open Access Journals, Free Medical Journals, and the Electronic Journals Library, which arranges e-journals by subject. By May 2004, 1,373 (35%) of the 3,869 titles on the LCML's A–Z list were accessible at no additional charge, and most of these were open access journals freely accessible worldwide.

The open access movement in the health sciences was furthered by NIH “Policy on Enhancing Public Access to Archived Publications Resulting from NIH-funded Research” [12], scheduled for implementation May 2, 2005. This policy could create a major increase in open access articles no later than twelve months following their official publication date, the continued revision of the self-archiving policies of publishers [13] to support the timeframe of the new policy and permit public access to articles in PubMed Central, and the continued change by more and more publishers of either making their flagship journals open access and/ or offering authors open access options for all their journals.

The new NIH public access policy also supports NIH's data mining and institutional repository goals. As the full text becomes publicly available on PubMed, it can be linked to other NIH nonbibliographic databases, such as the ever-growing array of molecular biology databases on Entrez. This linking will support data mining in which scientists can search the literature linked to these databases and not only increase their knowledge but make their own discoveries. As the number of publicly accessible articles grows, PubMed will become an institutional repository of NIH-supported research. Institutional repositories [14] of full-text articles published in one subject discipline, by faculty at a school or university or by scientists supported by a funding agency or working in a particular country, are growing in popularity worldwide.

Decreases in cost per use

By the mid-2000s, the cost per document for electronic health sciences journals paid entirely by the LCML, but with university-wide usage in most cases, or for electronic journal collections with health sciences titles paid by a University of Miami Library, but with usage at the Miller School of Medicine/Jackson Health System identifiable apart from university-wide usage, is $1.16. This low cost per use of approximately 70% of the PDF and HTML documents viewed in these journals during 2004/05 is due to the high use of online journals, savings realized from the cancellation of the print versions of online subscriptions and the downward effects of the open access movement and the economy on publisher pricing. Although this cost per use does not only reflect usage of online journals by the LCML's patrons, and may be somewhat deflated as a result, it does justify the seemingly high costs of many site licenses to commercially published and society published journals and is considered a positive indicator of the LCML's e-journal collection development policies and practices. The cost per use of online articles accessible by site licenses compares favorably to the higher cost per use of locally accessible print journals, which can be five times as much [10]; articles procured on interlibrary loan; and online articles purchased at publishers' Websites.

Outsourcing the A–Z list

Although maintaining the LCML's A–Z list for its thousands of e-journals became an onerous task by the early 2000s, an economic alternative did not become available until mid-2004. At that time, both SerialsSolutions and the relatively newer EBSCO A–Z list enhanced their products to permit access to some titles via a library's proxy server and free access to other titles. Prior to that time, access to all titles was only possible via a proxy server. Dual access was important at the LCML because more than 30% of the titles on its A–Z list were open access titles or in an aggregator database accessible by library members without access to its proxy server. In 2003, both products began providing access to titles on the A–Z list by subject for the first time.

By the end of 2004, the LCML had selected a vendor for its A–Z list, activated all titles on the LCML A–Z list, outsourced their maintenance, and made the new file accessible to its patrons. New titles are identified for activation from a title list created by the university library from the new MARC records they received monthly from the same vendor for titles added to their A–Z list. Because all e-journals in the health sciences are accessible university-wide, the numerous additions to the many aggregator databases are easily identified for the first time. Although its serials management system significantly alleviates the burden of maintaining the LCML A–Z list, these systems are not perfect [15] and in-house measures for tracking changes to online journals continue to be taken.

CONCLUSION

Although this paper focuses on the implementation of e-journals at the LCML during the 1995 to 2004 decade, this implementation reflects trends at other academic health sciences libraries and a growing number of libraries at hospitals and hospital systems. As previously described, the formats, access mechanisms, and management strategies that exist today were developed, for the most part, during the mid to late 1990s. Current trends include:

• the availability of articles in both PDF and HTML formats

• the elimination of passwords to restrict access

• site license prices based on content rather than on whether the container is print or electronic, with savings of approximately 10% if only the electronic version is acquired

• increases in the per-article fee of $30 to $40

• the continued merger of STM publishers and the ability to search or browse hundreds or thousands of journals on 1 Website

• the ability to acquire electronic journals from most publishers through a subscription agent

• the availability of COUNTER-compliant, institution-specific journal usage data at publisher Websites

• publisher initiatives to address the open access movement, including policies that permit archiving full text at institutional repositories and public accessibility of full text no more than 12 months following the official publication date

• library participation in ensuring perpetual access to electronic backfiles, such as the partnership of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the National Library of the Netherlands, with Elsevier and Blackwell; the retroactive files of the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central platform; and the participation of libraries in the LOCKSS program

During the period of significant growth in e-journal collections in academic health sciences libraries, which began in the years surrounding the new millennium, e-journals began gaining permanent acceptance by patrons and librarians alike. By the middle of the first decade, patrons are enjoying ready desktop access, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, to vastly enriched journal collections to support patient care at the point of care, distance education programs, and research activities. To support patron access, libraries provide full bibliographic access to their rich e-journal collections via the online public access catalog and rapid access by title, subject, and publisher or aggregator via in-house or vendor-supported serials management systems. Libraries provide links between bibliographic databases and the full text on the citation level and the online catalog on the title level and are able to capture detailed and standard usage data at most publisher Websites. Attendance at the nation's health sciences libraries continues to decrease, as do use of the print collections and interlibrary loan activity.

Electronic journals are forging new paths in both the way patrons use library resources and the way libraries process and maintain them and ensure their preservation. Libraries are canceling or planning to cancel print subscriptions as publishers announce sounder perpetual access policies and assume responsibility for storing and maintaining electronic collections. As usage of the print collections continues to plummet, usage of e-journals continues to soar.

Changes in scholarly communication continue as new policies from publishers support an ever-growing number of author self-archiving initiatives and institutional repositories throughout the nation and the world, as well as open access publishing options in which authors pay to have their articles publicly accessible immediately upon publication. The acceptable timeframe from publication to public access in an institutional repository continues to decline as major funding agencies, such as the National Institutes of Health and the Wellcome Trust, adopt public and/or open access policies. This enhanced accessibility of full text will support other scholarly initiatives, such as data mining and links to emerging electronic medical records.