Loretta Ebert, Director of Libraries & Information Services, is pleased to announce that, with considerable cost savings over individual contracts, the Rensselaer Libraries recently reached favorable terms and conditions to license Science Direct for Rensselaer, as well as for other independent academic libraries in New York State who are members of the Partners in Information and Innovation, or Pi2, consortium. As a result of this agreement, Science Direct will be implemented early this semester.
Science Direct is Reed Elsevier's on-line platform providing access to a significant body of the world's scientific, technical, and medical literature. It also provides on-line delivery of full-text from Elsevier and a growing list of other scholarly publishers, coupled with a large searchable database including 1.8 million abstracts, personalized features, and reciprocal links between Science Direct and other publishers' electronic resources.
In addition, and perhaps more noteworthy, is the provision that all institutions which participate in Science Direct will share in each other's holdings. This means that, if all Pi2 institutions were to participate, Rensselaer would collectively own 813 of the 1100 titles published by Elsevier that are included in Science Direct.
In past years, Rensselaer's Elsevier holdings in print have been eroded as a result of cancellations being required to meet inflationary cost increases. However, under this new proposal, Rensselaer's Libraries will be offered an opportunity to recover access to many of these titles in full-text, on-line. Ultimately, the consortium, with sufficient participation and coordination of the collection, could own the entire collection of Elsevier titles jointly, by canceling duplicates among the partners and replacing them with unique titles. In addition, if any institution wishes to cancel print titles and retain only on-line access to any existing holdings, they may do so and further reduce their costs by a factor of 10% below the print subscription costs. Articles in titles not owned by any participating institutions may be ordered and delivered on-line for a per article delivery fee.
Pi2 was founded five years ago at Rensselaer's initiative and has allowed us to license several products jointly for reduced costs, including, for example, Web of Science, Current Contents, NetAdvantage and Stat USA. Our membership generally includes small and mid-sized academic libraries in private institutions of higher education in New York. However, larger institutions (Syracuse, NYU, Cornell, University of Rochester, RIT) and institutions in other states (Williams, WPI, Swarthmore) have joined in Pi2 initiatives. Regionally, we've had Union, Skidmore, Albany Medical College and the NYS Department of Health participate in our joint contracts. With these potential partners, we have a very good chance of ultimately creating a complete online collection of Elsevier titles for the entire consortium.
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