Elsevier: “Robust Financial Performance in Unprecedented Global Recession”

According to Reed Elsevier’s 2009 Annual Report  they experienced “robust financial performance in unprecedented global recession.” Greeaat, glad somebody did.  The rest of us dealt with budget losses, lay offs, hiring freezes, furloughs, pay cuts or no raises.  And Elsevier wonders why some librarians get so angry at their pricing models. 

According to page 6 of the report “The Elsevier science and medical business (44% of adjust operating profits) had a relatively robust year.  In a challenging academic budget environment, the journal business entered 2009 with good subscription renewals from 2008.  In health Sciences, growing online sales in medical reference, clinical decision support and nursing and health professional education were partly held back by weak promotion markets.  In the near term academic budgets will remain under pressure and wear working with our academic customers to ensure that their growing information needs and goals for greater research efficiencies are met with the confines of their tighter funding environment.”

We all realize they are a for profit company and they are in business to make a profit.  I am all for making a profit.  But I kind of feel a little uncomfortable and conflicted, especially when I read the post “Elsevier 2009 $ 2 billion profits could fund worldwide OA at $1,383 per article.”

For the most part I have stayed out of the whole OA debate, there are others on both sides of the issue who are way more informed than I am on the subject.  But it would seem that as librarians are struggling to make ends meet with their shrinking budgets, the current method by which Elsevier (or other for profit publishers) price their resources will need to change for so that Elsevier and publishers can still remain profitable.  Because if the library doesn’t have the money, they can’t buy any resources.

Journals: What Doctors Read and What Librarians Buy

Recently, I wrote about the New England Journal of Medicine’s Essential Journals Study (PDF).  In the comments Tatiana correctly pointed out that some of the journal names listed in the results weren’t “real” journals.  She specifically mentioned the Biology of Bone and Marrow Transplantation probably should have been the Biology of Blood and Marrow Transplantation, and the journals Clinical Gastroenterology and Clinical Cancer were incorrect. 

Tom from the New England Journal of Medicine explained that the company conducting the survey did not provide a list of journals to choose from, instead doctors were asked to write in the names.  Therefore some doctors made some errors as to the correct and exact journal title. 

Tatiana was still skeptical that doctors would make such errors regarding journals specific to their fields of practice, and unfortunately I have to respectfully disagree with her.  Full disclosure, I am on the New England Journal of Medicine’s Library Advisory Board, but this not the reason I disagree with Tatiana.  I disagree because in my years as a medical librarian I see numerous physicians who don’t know the correct title of a journal that they recently published in let alone others in their field.  Just the other day I had a pediatrician question me as to why we did not have the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine.  We have the journal he wanted, the only problem is that he was calling it (and typing it into the A-Z) as Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine,  NOT the correct name Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.  That minor s on the end of Pediatric did not mean a lot to him but it meant a great deal to the A-Z list.  This is not uncommon, especially when you throw in those pesky (*wink*) British spellings like Clinical Orthopaedics and Related Research and the haematology journals. 

One way to solve this problem is to have a list of “real” journals to choose from.  However, I can understand why NEJM may not have wanted to have such a list.  Having a list artificially chooses the doctor’s results to a certain extent.  There is no way you can list every journal for every discipline for a survey for doctors.  If you want the results to be completely independent of any preselected list and you want to know the what journals first come to the mind of doctors, you are going to have to let them write it themselves.  Of course that opens things up for error.  I only bet on Fantasy Football, but I would be willing to wager that the pediatrician who questioned why we didn’t have Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, would not have written the s at the end of Pediatric. 

But Tatiana is right to look at the results with a skeptical eye.  Not every discipline was represented and there were fake journals listed and that could potentially skew the results. 

That is why The SLA DBIO 100 Poll results are interesting.  As the SLA Biomedical & Life Sciences Division Blog reports in their post, Doctors & The Librarians Who Serve Them Agree on the Medical Journals That Matter the Most, the “DBIO 100 poll tends to confirm the NEJM poll to a remarkable degree in ranking the more specialized journals in virtually all shared specialites, eith the occasional exception of some one -(or -rate) two place reversals.”  The NEJM poll also confirms the DBIO 100 poll. 

When you look at both polls together, it looks as if the very journals doctors want are the same ones that librarians are buying, which is good. Librarians have a pretty good handle on what their doctors use, want, and need for journals.  Considering our shrinking budgets we better be in tune with what are doctors want.  Reading through and having both of these lists can be important to some librarians as they make their journal selections each year.  Will it be the trump card for renewing? No, our usage statistics and price usually are the main reasons for renewing or not.  However it never hurts to have too much information.  Additionally these two polls could be very helpful when dealing with an administration that questions the need to buy so many expensive journals.  Librarians can also use these two polls to create their own survey for their own insititution.  They can look to see if their colleciton matches their doctor’s needs and to see if their doctor’s needs vary any from the national polls.

Friday Food, MLA 2010 Style

All of you foodie librarians going to MLA this year will be happy to see the MLA 2010 Restaurant Guide  is available now online (PDF) for you to read through and drool over.  Also helpful is a Google Map created by C. Scott  that lists all of the restaurants on the map so you can see exactly where each place is in relation to the hotel. 

Thank you 2010 LAC, my only complaint…I can’t go to all of these places.

What is a Professional Librarian?

As always David Rothman has discovered some interesting pieces about the “professional librarian,” whether the term professional is an oxymoron (as stated by Ryan Deschamps) and “The Library Paraprofessional Movement and the Deprofessionalization of Librarianship,” by Rory Litwin

David looks at both arguments and provides is thoughts and insight to both Deschamps and Litwin.  Make sure you read the comments (and not just because I commented) because others have decided to chime in and offer their thoughts which extends the discussion even further.  To add your .02 cents go over to David’s blog and post a comment.

Maternity and Infant Care: Ovid’s Resource of the Month

Mother’s Day is this Sunday and it just so happens that Ovid’s Resource of the Month for May is the Maternity and Infant Care Database.

(from Ovid)
First developed in 1988, the MIDIRS Reference Database has grown in size and stature with around 550 international English language journals being regularly scanned for inclusion in the database.

The MIDIRS (Midwives Information and Resource Service) Reference database is an amalgamation of references to journal articles, book chapters, reports, pamphlets, news items, audio visual materials, conference proceedings and other ‘grey literature’ relating to the midwifery profession, pregnancy, labour, birth, postnatal care, and neonatal care extending into the first year of life.

The database is free all this month, although you do have to provide your contact information each time you want to search it. 

Try it now at Ovid
Learn more about Maternity and Infant Care from Ovid

Group Purchasing Opportunity for Hospital & Academic Libraries in the GMR

This morning I read an email from Max Anderson, Technology Coordinator of the NN/LM GMR, about the opportunity for hospital and academic medical libraries within the GMR to be a part of group purchasing packages.  As budgets shrink many librarians are looking for ways to get more bang for their buck and one is to purchase things as a group. 

I know there are many hospital librarians within the 10 GMR states that may not be subscribed to the GMRLIST where Max posted this information and I felt this was just too important not to re-post.  My hope is by re-posting it, the message will spread to others who may not have been on the list when the email was sent. 

If you are librarian working at a medical library within the GMR, please fill out the questionnaire.  The more people we have the better informed we are about what the needs are of the region and the better we are to try and get package that will be the most beneficial.

(re-posted with permission from Max Anderson)

Hello GMR Members! 

The E-Licensing Working Group of the RAC at the GMR has been in contact with the Midwest Collaborative for Library Services (MCLS) about possibly offering group purchasing of health-related online packages (ebooks, ejournals, databases, etc) to all GMR members in the 10-state region. In order to determine which packages might be initially offered to GMR members, we would like you to complete a questionnaire. 

All of these are the electronic versions – no print versions. Please submit your completed survey by 5/31/2010

These offers are for new business only. The vendors are not at this time willing to change pre-existing packages. However, if this project brings them enough new business, they may take notice of it and be more inclined to offer deals for pre-existing packages. 

There are virtually no price lists for any of these products. As is the case with many vendors, we won’t know what price they are willing to come down to or discount they might offer, unless we know how many organizations are interested in the product in the first place. This is sort of the chicken/egg syndrome. 

Please fill out the questionnaire, which can be found here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/elicensing

NLM Posts a Resource Page for the Crude Oil Spill

(courtesy of Medlib-l)

NLM has a page listing links to information on crude oil spills and human health at http://disasterinfo.nlm.nih.gov/dimrc/oilspills.html.  It specifically is focused on the United States and the state agencies response to oil spills. 

For the latest updates about the recent spill and the controlled burning clean up go to “Featured Sites.”

 

Ovid Users Get to Know the New OvidSP

I posted earlier this month that Ovid launched a new version of OvidSP.  The new OvidSP will be going live fairly soon, so it would probably be a good idea to be prepared before the switch. 

Here are some ways that you can prepare for the switch:

  • Go to the OvidSP Resource Center and click on the Training Center tab.  Ovid is offering new training sessions covering the enhancements made to OvidSP.  They have web-based instructor sessions as well as online tutorials. 
  • Quick Reference Cards, check it out online and order some for your library.  They are also great to use as a starting point for customizing your own library specific Ovid search cards. 
  • If you are looking for a quick comparison of Old OvidSP and New OvidSP there is a good side by side PDF available.
  • My Projects is a new feature in OvidSP and from what I can tell it is similar to PubMed’s MyNCBI but unlike MyNCBI you can store the full text in MyProjects. 

I plan on taking an more in-depth look at the new changes made to OvidSP within the next week or two and I will write more the changes at that time.

Books Citations in PubMed

Earlier this month the NLM Technical Bulletin reported that PubMed will soon be enhanced to include citations for books available on the NCBI Bookshelf.  I checked today and the the first books added to PubMed, GeneReviews and Essentials of Glycobiology are in the database.  Not only are the books as a whole in PubMed but citations for each chapter or section are also  included.  Each book in the NCBI bookshelf including their chapters will be added.

The PubMed display will be slightly different for the books and the bulletin does a great job of describing the changes.  The changes are mainly related to the fact that it is displaying a book, not an article.  As a result, links like “Related Articles” have been renamed to “Related Citations.” 

Searching for books in PubMed is different, see the bulletin for best methods.  It is important to note while searching for books or book chapters that they are NOT IN MEDLINE and WILL NOT have MeSH terms.  I am extremely conflicted with this.  I like the idea of having the NCBI bookshelf in PubMed but I think it creates a bigger problem.  While we librarians know that PubMed is technically not MEDLINE, the idea is a difficult concept for normal users, especially when we library professionals often use the terms interchangeably.  MEDLINE has been so entwined with PubMed and very few people see the difference.  It is wrong, there is a difference, but go find a normal medical library user that knows this. 

To have books from the NCBI bookshelf in PubMed but not MEDLINE is going to confuse the vast majority of users.  Based on that, you would think I am not in favor of this new addition to PubMed.  On the contrary, I think it is long overdue. Great the NCBI bookshelf is on PubMed, but what about all of the other books out there?  Personally, I would love to see books from LocatorPlus added to PubMed.  I think it is high time we have a medical literature database that covers articles as well as book chapters.  But for that to be effective the books and the chapters should be indexed and added to the MEDLINE database. 

I am forever telling people that books and book chapters (as well as published abstracts) are not in MEDLINE so searching PubMed won’t retrieve them.  I am going to have to change my search help elevator speech, because this is no longer the case.  There are now a few books in PubMed.  The NCBI bookshelf is only a drop in the bucket of books published and having those books and no other books in PubMed, not even MEDLINE, muddies the waters. 

I know the folks at NLM see this as a way to increase access to the NCBI bookshelf, but I just see it as another way librarians are not thinking of their users. If they were thinking of their users then they would start to add the LocatorPlus books into MEDLINE and index them so researchers can find them and request them from their libraries.  I realize this is a huge undertaking but we need to start thinking like our users.  Most of our users want information, and they want one place to find it.