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With the outbreak of the economic crisis, which began 5 years ago, libraries have faced the need to reconsider their role and services. The strong reduction of their budgets, particularly evident (but not only) in the countries of the Mediterranean area, caused a significant decline in terms of performance and available resources for users. This paradigm forced the librarians to redesign their activity in order to find new strategies and solutions that ensure an acceptable quality level of services offered by the library. The speech analyzes the path of the Istituto Superiore di Sanità’s Library (the Italian National Health Institute) for obtaining a rationalization of journals subscriptions, strengthening of cooperation strategies and implementation of new projects and services.

In 2011 the Istituto Superiore di Sanità (ISS), the Italian National Institute of Health, has been forced, due to economic reason, to leave the Bibliosan Consortium contract with the publisher Elsevier. The contract, following the “big deal” model, provided for the maintenance of paper subscriptions and the payment of an additional fee for the whole electronic collection (more than 2,000 journal titles). The continuous increase of annual costs has led to unsustainable growth in costs and to the subsequent cancellation of the contract. This meant that more than 500 researchers of the Institute have suddenly had access to just 180 Elsevier current titles instead of the previous 2,000. The study traces the various stages which led to taking this unavoidable decision to cut about half of the Elsevier’s journals and analyzes its impact.

Started in 2003, as Project Bibliosan the Italian network of Health Libraries and became in 2006 the System Bibliosan and it is now a permanent and structured organization that includes 55 different institutions, which are the most important of the country in the health research field. Bibliosan is now a reality in the outline of the national libraries consortia, receiving regular funding from the Ministry of Health (2 million Euros in 2008), a common catalogue, an efficient document delivery system and above all a coordinate structure for the acquisition of shared electronic resources (i.e. journals and data bases). In 2008, almost 5,000 online journals have been bought by the consortium and added to the 3,500 open access journals assuring researchers a portfolio of more than 8,000 available titles in the catalogue. The realization of the Bibliosan System allowed the achievement of many important goals, starting from a consistent return on investment to a rationalization of libraries collections, until an enormous enhancement of potential access to the electronic resources by the researchers of all involved partners. The paper will investigate the principal steps of the project, analyzing the critical points and focusing on the important results obtained, including an investigation of the relationship between articles downloaded and articles produced by the researchers.

The exponential growth of e-journal access and downloads has strongly enhanced the role of statistical data, in order to evaluate the use of resources and define subscription acquisition strategies and their management. On one hand, the automatic data harvesting performed by computers provides statistics, but on the other hand it does not guarantee the comparability and harmonisation of collected data. Therefore, the process of statistical data formulation has to be supported by the use of standards - the most important being “counter” which is gradually becoming the de facto in this field. That could permit the merging of obtained results from different systems. Furthermore, all the main commercial publishers regularly supply reliable statistics unlike Open Access resource suppliers and aggregators, with the exception of BioMed Central, that does provide statistics. All this could have some negative implications for decision makers that do not have a suitable system to choose between Open Access and equivalent or similar non Open Access resources. Recent studies have established that Open Access articles have an IF and a citation level higher than the others. It should be fundamental to verify the use of Open Access periodicals compared to the non Open Access ones in the same fields. If the results of this analysis are in favour of Open Access journals, these could become an important factor for the success of the Open Access initiative in terms of reducing library expenditure for serials. The access identification of journals through the user IP address is a globally adopted method and easy to apply, therefore it could bring about a significant increase in the diffusion of Open Access periodicals.

The continuous increase of electronic resources in biomedical libraries involves a detailed analysis on their use, from the general impact on library services to the observation of statistical data and including also a monitoring of users’ customs. Starting from this framework the paper will focus the importance of some tools such as ISO library standards, statistics on the use of electronic products (e-journals, data bases, catalogues, etc.), surveys on users, in order to evaluate achieved results and to support decisions and management policy in the library. The study will analyse the features of statistics automatically generated by the systems of some of the most important publishers and library consortia, comparing the results and pointing out differences and difficulties in merging data originated from several sources. A short description of Counter project and its aims as a possible solution to this problem will be also included, such as a glance to ISO standards on Library Statistics (2789) and Performance Indicators (11620) for the aspects linked with the adoption of a common terminology and methodology of evaluation. The final purpose is to underline the importance of this tools and data in the decision making processes, first of all in the field of acquisition and subscription policy of the library.

The automatization project of the ISS library started in early '80. We analized statistics of use of this services.

The Congress was organised into four sessions: 1) Open Access (OA) and authors: support from the international community; 2) OA in Italy: knowledge and tools to write and search; 3) institutional policies for OA; 4) opportunities and services to develop OA. It was aimed at achieving the following objectives: a) make authors of biomedical publications aware of the benefits of depositing research material in digital open archives and publishing in OA peer-reviewed journals; b) outline the impact of the OA publishing model on the assessment of research output; c) enhance the adoption of policies encouraging the OA paradigm; d) promote cooperation between research institutions in Italy and abroad to share resources and experiences on institutional repositories. A useful introductory bibliography on the OA publishing model in the biomedical field is included in the Appendix.