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Students, faculty and staff from all Indiana University campuses now have access to 1,081 on-line science and social science journals, thanks to a successful library collaboration that makes available scholarly journals at a fraction of the normal subscription cost. Authorized users may access the journals, collectively known as PEAK (Pricing Electronic Access to Knowledge) from any computer connected to the Internet--at the libraries, on campus or anywhere across the country.
Libraries throughout the IU system joined together to offer the journals to their users through August 1999. The service offers access to the complete articles published in the journals and makes them particularly valuable. "The search capability allows researchers to scan a large body of literature across disciplines to create their own world view," said IU librarian Julie Bobay, coordinator of the project. "The research potential is tremendous."
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Spearheaded jointly by the University of Michigan and Elsevier, the PEAK collaboration will produce pricing models for libraries. PEAK seeks to study the effectiveness of various pricing and product schemes for electronic access to scholarly literature. It's not unusual for a single year's subscription to a chemistry journal to cost as much as $10,000. Many cost $5,000. The rising cost of scholarly journals has become a concern for research libraries across the country, and at IU, President Myles Brand has convened a Committee on Scholarly Communication to review the complex relationships among faculty members, universities and the publishing industry. "Universities pay faculty members, in part, to push forward the frontiers of knowledge," Brand said. And when faculty disseminate this knowledge through publication, they give away their copyright to the journal. "Then, university libraries buy these journals back from the publishers, providing them handsome profits," Brand said. "So, universities are paying for these materials more than once."
The committee, co-chaired by Suzanne Thorin, Ruth Lilly University Dean of University Libraries, and Distinguished Professor Gary Hieftje, chairperson of the IUB chemistry department, is working to identify ways to control prices for research and scholarly publications while increasing access--and to chart a course of action at IU.
The IU Libraries continue to increase the scope and accessibility of Web based databases available to IU faculty and students. In 1997, the Indiana General Assembly and the Indiana State Library in Indianapolis provided funding for four popular databases that provide full-text articles from thousands of scholarly journals.
To view a list of the PEAK journals or to register as an authorized user, go to:
http://www.indiana.edu/~libweb/peak/
For more on PEAK, go to:
https://www.umdl.umich.edu/peak/
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