APPENDIX 22
Memorandum from the European Association
for Health Information and Libraries
EAHILThe European Association for Health
Information and Libraries is an active professional association
uniting and motivating librarians and information officers working
in health science libraries in Europe. Some of the main objectives
are to improve co-operation amongst health science libraries throughout
Europe, to raise standards of provision and practice in health
science libraries and to represent health science librarians at
European level. The association counts about 400 members from
25 European countries.
Biomedical knowledge is today being generated
at a staggering rate. Far more than two million articles are published
each year in about 21,000 biomedical journals, and the number
of published articles is said to increase by 4% each year. This
new knowledge must be captured, analysed, and disseminated in
order for it to be useful and to make a difference in health care.
Health science libraries ensure that quality biomedical information
is available to support health care, research and learning within
our institutions, medical communities and society. The challenge
lies in finding new approaches to deal with the increasing volume
and complexity of biomedical information and thereby improve our
understanding of health and disease.
Information technology holds the promise of
delivering specific knowledge in a timely manner to our communities,
in ways undreamed of even a short time ago. Health science libraries
now have the opportunity to provide near-instantaneous reliable
access to high-quality health information resources. Health science
libraries are now embracing new technologies and adjust to the
priorities of their parent institutions.
Today the costs of published scholarship far
exceed the library budget, which means that the information is
not readily available.
In many countries physicians are obliged by
law to always stay up to date in their fields. That means working
under cross-pressure from the profession itself, from the health
authorities, from the well-informed patients, and in worst cases
from lawyers. To survive, the physicians need access to appropriate
information.
SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION
The scientists who perform research and the
professional societies that represent them have a great interest
in ensuring that research results are disseminated as immediately,
broadly and effectively as possible. There is today a growing
understanding that the present system of scholarly communication
must change. The traditional system of scholarly communication
has many constraints. The Internet has fundamentally changed the
practical and economic realities of distributing published scientific
knowledge and makes possible substantially increased access.
Today there is a worldwide movement towards
Open Access of Information. The Open Archives Initiative (OAI)
(www.openarchives.org), the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI)
(www.soros.org/openaccess/), SPARC (www.arl.org/sparc/), Public
Library of Science (http://www.plos.org/) and BioMed Central (www.biomedcentral.com)
are leading the way in this transformation process.
TWO ROUTES
TO OPEN
ACCESS
EAHIL supports the two routes to open access:
open access journals with author-fees
and/or institutional subscriptions to author-pays journals
e-print repositories where scientists
can self-archive their preprint or published papers
EAHIL wishes to emphasise that scientists and
scientific societies, libraries and publishers should make every
effort to hasten this transition in a fashion that does not disrupt
the orderly dissemination of scientific information.
Health science libraries are now becoming more
deeply engaged in the creation and dissemination of knowledge
and are becoming essential collaborators with the other stakeholders
in these activities. The role of the health science library moves
from manager of scholarly products to that of participant in the
scholarly communication process.
Health science libraries are developing and
supporting mechanisms to make the transition to open access publishing
including providing tools and services to facilitate innovation
in publishing, particularly e-print repositories and promoting
open access journals.
Health science libraries are both in their education
and outreach activities, teaching their users about the benefits
of open access publishing and open access journals.
OPEN ACCESS
JOURNALS
Many medical libraries pay the institutional
members' fee of BioMed Central, which means that all scientists
can publish their articles free of charge in BioMed Central journals.
Health science libraries now list and highlight
open access journals in our catalogs and other relevant databases.
One example is Directory of Open Access Journals (http://www.doaj.org/).
This service covers free, full text, quality controlled scientific
and scholarly journals. DOAJ aims to cover all subjects and languages.
There are now 736 journals in the directory.
E-PRINT REPOSITORIES
By setting up, promoting and managing an institutional
repository the library can create a stable location where scientific
information produced by the institute can be preserved and disseminated.
The institutional repository should be OAI-compliant. OAI-PMH
(Open Archives InitiativeProtocol for Metadata Harvesting)
defines a mechanism for data providers to expose their metadata.
Service Providers use metadata harvested via the OAI-PMH as a
basis for building value-added services.
We believe that in the future electronic personal
publication will be the norm and will supplement traditional commercial
publisher but not replace them. Authors must carefully consider
what rights they assign to publishers if they want to self-archive
a copy of their work.
February 2004
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