MERCED - Students, faculty and other researchers at the
University of California, Merced, now have electronic access to
more than 1,100 journals published by Taylor & Francis, thanks
to a new deal between the publisher and the California Digital
Library (CDL), a network connecting libraries and offering digital
access to materials at all 10 UC campuses.
“Taylor & Francis is a growing publisher of important
psychology journals,” said Evan Heit, a psychology professor in UC
Merced’s School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts. “The
availability of these materials online will be helpful to our
students as they write term papers and to faculty as they conduct
their research.”
“Because we are part of the UC system, our students have access
to amazing resources that even 50- to 100-year-old colleges can’t
touch. These journals are a significant new addition to that
selection,” said UC Merced Deputy University Librarian Donald Barclay.
Taylor & Francis publishes a wide variety of scholarly
journals on subjects from physics to social sciences. The company’s
Web site is at
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals. When users visit this site
from the UC Merced computer network or another UC network, no login
is required to access the journals’ content.
By the end of the summer, the content should also be searchable
through the CDL’s Melvyl® catalog (
http://melvyl.cdlib.org/)
and through the UC Merced library catalog, both of which can be
used from any location on or off campus.
Barclay said the CDL/Taylor & Francis deal is emblematic of
how the academic publishing world has been undergoing rapid change
for several years.
“Prices for journals have been rising for more than 30 years,
sometimes at well over twice the rate of inflation,” he said.
“Library systems with buying power like the UC’s have decided to
negotiate harder with the publishers rather than just accepting
whatever prices were offered.”
UC Merced’s library now offers access to about 15,000 journals
through the CDL and campus-specific access. Yet none of these
journals are found in print in the library. Barclay said other
libraries are no longer using their precious floor space for print
journals, either - mainly because users now prefer to accomplish
research from their computers.
“Fifteen years ago, the current periodicals reading room was the
hot spot of any campus library,” he said. “Now, it’s a ghost town.”
The space that was originally intended to be UC Merced’s
periodicals room is more of a relaxation destination and social
gathering spot than a research area.
“Online access is what people want,” Barclay said. “Offering it
this way through the CDL system helps all the UC campuses use money
from taxpayers and from student fees much more efficiently.”
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