Labtiva: university of utah, nature publishing group pilot the readcube alternative to traditional single journal article purchases
abernard102@gmail.com 2012-09-28
Summary:
"In an effort to eliminate gaps in access to research literature, the software company Labtiva has launched a pilot program that provides libraries and institutions with affordable and instant access to scientific articles in non-subscribed journals. The first participants in the pilot program, called ReadCube Access, are the University of Utah and Nature Publishing Group. 'We want to help scientists access any journal article they need, without having to pay $30 per article or jump through other hoops,' says Siniša Hrvatin, who co-founded Labtiva to create simple software to improve the discovery, organization, and readability of peer-reviewed literature. 'Currently researchers rely on their libraries to purchase articles individually and at significant expense, spend research funds to purchase articles for themselves, or simply go without access ,' says Rick Anderson, the University of Utah’s Associate Dean for Scholarly Resources and Collections. Researchers at the university no longer need to pay to read articles in any journal on Nature.com, including more than 50 titles for which the institution does not hold full site licenses. Instead, the library picks up the tab as researchers download articles in a single click through the free ReadCube literature management application. The library will pay only $5 to $10 for each download. Researchers can also choose to rent an article for 48 hours, which will cost the library only $3 to $6. Articles downloaded through ReadCube Access appear as normal PDFs, but cost much less because they may not be printed or shared. 'Nature Publishing Group exists to provide the highest quality scientific research to the widest possible audience,' says its Managing Director, Steven Inchcoombe. 'The ReadCube Access pilot program is another step in our continuing efforts to fulfill that role for science, building on our other article rental activities and initiatives like British Library Direct. We see these new offerings as a complement to site license and subscription-based access, which provide access to the full text HTML and downloadable PDF.' 'University libraries want to provide their patrons with immediate access to exactly the resources they need, but no library can afford to subscribe to every journal in every discipline,' says Anderson. 'We see the ReadCube Access program as a very promising model for giving our researchers and students fast and low-cost access to the specialized content they need in order to do their scholarly work. ' The goal for ReadCube Access, according to Hrvatin, is to establish a model mutually beneficial to researchers, libraries, and publishers to expand access to research literature by supplementing existing site licenses. Hrvatin says discussions with other publishers and universities are already underway."