The Gustave L. and Janet W. Levy Library

Off-Campus Access to UpToDate Has Been Discontinued.
On-Campus Access Will Continue

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Off-campus (remote) access to UpToDate has been discontinued. On-campus access continues to be available. For the past two years, the Levy Library has provided both on-campus and off-campus access to UpToDate. Providing off-campus access more than doubled our cost, but we believed that UpToDate's value in the clinical decision making process warranted the extra investment. Additionally, it has always been our goal to make all of the library's electronic resources available to the Mount Sinai community anytime and anywhere. Until now, we have been successful.

Unfortunately, in our recent negotiations to renew our license, we have not been able to arrive at a fair and reasonable price. In order to include off-campus access in our license, UpToDate has quoted a price that is close to $350,000 for 2006 - an increase of over 300% compared to our current license. By 2008, the cost would increase to approximately $650,000 per year. UpToDate's pricing model is clearly designed to discourage institutional licenses that include off-campus access. Their goal is to encourage users to purchase personal subscriptions. We believe this is a misguided strategy, but it leaves us with no other choice than to license UpToDate for on-campus use only. Our situation parallels many other academic health science libraries that have been faced with unreasonable price increases when their UpToDate license was up for renewal. And, like us, they have also canceled their off-campus access and continued to offer on-campus access only.

As an alternative to using UpToDate, we suggest you consider using the following resources that offer disease/condition summaries that typically cover diagnosis and treatment. These resources can be selected from the Library's list of databases, under the category of Medicine.

• eMedicine - contains over 6500 peer-reviewed summaries.
• PIER (The Physician's Information and Education Resource) - published by the American College of Physicians. PIER contains hundreds of disease summaries offering evidence-based guidance.
• Current Medical Diagnosis and Treatment (CMDT) - contains more than 1000 easy to read summaries.