STM publisher Elsevier, Netherlands, recently announced an agreement with The Royal Society of Medicine (RSM) to provide its 21,000 members with electronic access to thousands of peer-reviewed medical and surgical journals and reference books.
The RSM will be able to offer its members access to more than 540 journals, including The Lancet, and 1,060 books, including titles such as Gray's Anatomy and Netter's Anatomy, through Elsevier's ClinicalKey or via the RSM's online library catalogue.
The RSM's decision follows a review of its library strategy, which emphasises making such information available electronically to meet the demands of its members.
By utilising ClinicalKey's content, the Society will ensure that multiple members are able to access reliable clinical reference material at any time, and away from the physical library building. This will assist them in their studies and support them in their clinical work enhancing the care they give to their patients. Members will also be able to access, download, store and, if necessary, print an article or chapter whenever they require, including in the hospital setting.
The RSM library, which has more than 600,000 volumes, aims to be virtually electronic by January 2014, with the exception of its historical archive and rare books collection.
By using ClinicalKey the RSM expects to realise significant reductions in storage and labour costs associated with retrieving and maintaining archive copies. It will also ensure material is preserved despite it being used by thousands of people for training, research and decision support. Members will also be able to take advantage of new study space that will take the place of the paper-based journals.
In addition to online access to hundreds of books and journals, ClinicalKey also will provide members from across the world with more than 13,000 medical and surgical videos for clinical training, a database of clinical guidelines and more than 3,000 drug monographs in Elsevier's Clinical Pharmacology.
Launched in April 2012, ClinicalKey provides online access to medical reference materials, including the most current clinically relevant evidence-based answers, as well as expert commentary, MEDLINE abstracts and select third-party journals. Its clinical reference search engine is powered by Elsevier's Smart Content and tagged with EMMeT (Elsevier Merged Medical Taxonomy), which enables ClinicalKey to understand clinical terms and thus discover medical content that is the most relevant, plus find related content that would be missed by other search engines.
