GEORGE TOWN, Oct 16 — Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM), the nation’s apex varsity has taken a strange step backwards by stopping its subscription to Science Direct website, the world’s leading source for scientific, technical and medical full text research.
USM has somehow incredibily justified its decision, all in the name of smaller budgets resulting in cost-cutting measures even if it came at the expense of undergraduate and post-graduate students being denied this very important access.
The Malay Mail was recently alerted to this issue after it found that the USM library had its budget reduced by a staggering 38 per cent this year.
Science Direct is a leading full-text scientific database offering various journal articles and book chapters from more than 2,500 journals and almost 20,000 books.
One of its features is that the articles published in their Open Access journals are made permanently free for everyone to access immediately upon publication.
However, in order to provide an alternative, the library has subscribed to a service known as the “Science Direct Document Delivery Service”, to help them get articles in a timely manner.
Students now have to fill in an online form, check the status of requested articles and will only receive full text articles within 48 hours. This has somehow proven to be a bane for the students.
“What if my son wanted an immediate reference for his research or thesis? What if the materials needed are not available after 48 hours?” said a parent, who declined to be named.
“I believe this is a step in the wrong direction for the university.”
As the apex university, USM is supposed to become a recognised world class entity by 2020.
Being granted the apex university status allows USM to have more “autonomy” in its finance, service scheme, management, student intake, study fees as well as the top leadership.
The university edged out three other higher learning centres, including the country’s oldest, Universiti Malaya, to emerge as the then Higher Education Ministry’s choice for apex university.
According to its website, following the awarding of the apex status in 2008, USM has executed a rebranding-cum-advocacy programme that would allow it to deepen and translate its main mission as “a pioneering university, trans-disciplinary and research intensive, that empowers future talents and enables the bottom billions to transform their socioeconomic well-being”.
With such a mission, it is just mind boggling why the university cancelled its subcription to Science Direct.
USM is currently ranked 355 in the QS World University Rankings this year and was given the target to put itself among the world’s Top 100 universities and among the Top 50 by 2020.
