RE: Roundtable Press Release (Access to Research Results)

[T Scott Plutchak <tscott@uab.edu>]

In my experience there are very few licenses that flat out 
prevent interlibrary loan.  In most cases, publishers require 
that the lending library print out a copy of the article and use 
that to initiate the loan, rather than sending the pdf directly. 
Personally, I think this is an unnecessary inconvenience, but 
we're still able to make the loan.


T. Scott Plutchak

Director, Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences
University of Alabama at Birmingham
tscott@uab.edu


-----Original Message-----
Sent: Thursday, January 21, 2010 6:33 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: RE: Roundtable Press Release (Access to Research Results)

On Wed, 20 Jan 2010, Todd Puccio wrote:

*****

B.  On the topic of researchers not being able to afford access
to articles, two points come to my mind.

1.If a particular article is known, how often is it unavailable
through Inter-Library Loan ? ILL is very quick these days and
much less expensive than an entire journal subscription.

2.The idea that an institution can afford to have expensive
journal subscriptions in its collection is part of what makes for
healthy institutional competition. No ?  [...] Institutions with
less resources still have access to ILL services.

*****

As more academic libraries move to electronic-only journal
subscriptions to save money and space, licenses often prohibit
the use of the electronic source for interlibrary loan services.
So we may soon end up with institutional silos unable to ILL for
each other from their e-only collections.  Publishers
conveniently ignore this fact when saying "There is no access
problem, and thus no need for federally mandated OA."

Jim Stemper
University of Minnesota Libraries
Minneapolis, MN  55455
stemp003@tc.umn.edu