University of Maryland

This list is part of the Open Access Directory.

2004

• Changes in Access to Journals Published by Reed Elsevier, a letter from William W. Destler, Provost, to the faculty, February 20, 2004.
• Summary: The university cancelled consortial access to the Baltimore campus subscriptions and converted the College Park campus subscriptions to electronic-only. It describes the failed Elsevier negotiations in language similar to that in the TRLN statement above, and then continues. "By retaining the ability to cancel titles, the Libraries maintain the option of building collections with other publishers' titles where they provide greater value to the campus community....The University of Maryland is working with other research universities to address this crisis. One example of this type of work is the Libraries' participation in the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition [SPARC]....I firmly believe that universities must address this crisis in the system of scholarly communication. Our libraries need our support in their work with the university community to regain control of their budgets, their collections, and the intellectual property that is the ultimate output of the research enterprise. I encourage you to continue to engage in discussions with our library faculty about what we are doing to explore new models of scholarly communication and restore a measure of rationality to the publishing system. It is important to extend the discussion beyond our campus as well, especially for those of you who serve on editorial boards of journals published commercially or by learned societies."