What the UH Libraries Are Doing

The University of Houston Libraries have been at the forefront of addressing scholarly communication issues since the late 1980's. From 1989 to 2000, we published The Public-Access Computer Systems Review, a free, peer-reviewed e-journal that allowed authors to retain copyright and allowed unrestricted copying for educational, noncommercial purposes. Since 1996, we have published the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography, a free, regularly updated e-book that inform readers about the latest scholarly publishing efforts on the Internet. SEPB also includes a directory of related Web resources and a Weblog. Moreover, for more than a decade, the Libraries have maintained a directory of established Web-based scholarly journals that offer access to English-language articles without requiring user registration or fees. In 2004 and 2005, the Libraries organized the Serials Symposium to update attendees on the state of journal publishing.

With a view to increase the UH community's awareness of relevant issues, the Libraries created the Scholarly Communication Public Relations Task Force in 2004. We have since launched the Transforming Scholarly Communication Web site and its accompanying Weblog, which are aimed at encouraging faculty and graduate students to assume a more active role in the process of scholarly communication and to pursue alternative scholarly publishing models. The Libraries are currently planning a symposium in which attendees can further their understanding of the issues through discussions with noted speakers and among themselves.

Meanwhile, we are planning an institutional repository that will electronically house UH's academic outputs such as faculty's research papers and students' theses and dissertations. It will enhance the visibility of and accessibility to those scholarly publications.

The Libraries are a founding member of the new Texas Digital Library, a collaborative digital library project that includes four of the largest research libraries in Texas (Texas A&M University, Texas Tech University, the University of Houston, and the University of Texas at Austin).

Nationally, the Libraries are a member of the Association of Research Libraries, the Coalition for Networked Information, and the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC). Through the efforts of these organizations, we have been involved in influencing public policies related to scholarly communication and in promoting resources for author's rights and unconventional business models of scholarly publishing.

In addition, the Libraries are a supporting member of BioMed Central, an open access journal publisher. Our researchers enjoy discounted article processing charges when they publish articles in BioMed Central's journals. The Libraries are a Charter Supporter of BioOne, a collaborative effort to migrate biological sciences journals from small societies and noncommercial publishers to digital form and to provide access to them at a reasonable cost. The Libraries are also a Charter Participant of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization that is building and maintaining a digital archive of key scholarly journals.

To broaden the UH community's access to scholarly literatures, the Libraries have been subscribing to electronic resources (books, journals, and databases) that are available off campus. Users can find and access them via the UH Library Catalog, the EBSCO A-Z service, and the Find Articles (Electronic Databases) page. At the same time, we have added open access journals of high quality to the UH Library Catalog. This not only facilitates access to them, but also helps introduce users to this unconventional model of scholarly publishing. Last but not least, the Libraries provide efficient interlibrary loan service to users who cannot obtain the needed items from our collections.