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News From the Libraries: January 2025

Newsletter Summary

A Message from the Director

Library Chairs: Updates and Refurbishments

Read & Publish

Featured eBook of the Month

Historical Image of the Month

From the Archives

Black and white photo of a man sitting in front of an antique computer terminal
Jim Westbrook sits in the "nerve center" of the new building automation system, with two of four terminals that display data. - The News, October, 1975

Photo courtesy of the P.I. Nixon Medical Historical Library, located on the 5th floor of the main library

Find us on social media! Facebook & Instagram: @uthealthlibraries or Youtube: @uthscsalibrary

Message from the Executive Director

Portrait of Pat HawthorneI hope this finds your 2025 off to a great start! My name is Pat Hawthorne, and I joined UT Health San Antonio as Executive Director of Libraries in August 2024. The last six months have been wonderful and eye-opening, and I am thrilled to be a part of this institution. The opening of the new UT Multispecialty & Research Hospital in December was a real high point and testament to the dedication of this institution and the team that made it a reality. All the amazing research is truly inspiring. The planned merger of UT Health San Antonio and UTSA will offer opportunities for expanded library services and collections for students, faculty, and staff on both campuses. I have so enjoyed meeting a number of our talented and dedicated faculty, staff, and students.

This month, we will be seeking input from our students on new task chairs for our public spaces on the 3rd, 4th, and 5th Floors. Replacing the current chairs is a much-needed refresh and will offer comfortable seating for our students who spend a great deal of time in the library studying, working, and collaborating. Check out the news story below for details – and join us on January 28,29, and 30 to see the chair options and vote for your favorite. The library serves as a hub for learning, exploration, and collaboration. Our goal is to make the public spaces comfortable, welcoming, and safe for students, staff, and faculty. In addition to replacing older furniture, we will be exploring other options to enhance our spaces to meet student needs.

I invite you to connect with our library team members if you need help with your research, courses, or any other information need. Our liaison librarians provide expertise and offer personalized help to both students and faculty. Our collections team offers expert help with resources, open access options, and special collections and archives. Be sure to check out the update below on Read & Publish agreements. The entire library team strives to create an environment that encourages critical thinking, supports evidence-based practice, and fosters research excellence and the pursuit of knowledge. We are here to serve you!

Over the next year, we will be working on making this newsletter one of our primary methods of communication and have a number of new ideas to share more information with the UTHSA community about the library, our resources and collections, library events, and our staff. If you have ideas about what you would like to see in this newsletter, please contact me via email – hawthorne@uthscs.edu – or call me at 210-567-2413.

I look forward to hearing from you and meeting more of you in 2025!

Pat Hawthorne
Executive Director of Libraries

Library Chairs: Updates and Refurbishments

4 task chairs the library might buy

We want your vote!

The library is beginning the process of updating the chairs in the general areas of the library. This will be a multi-year project that will include:

  • Replacement of the old task chairs with new models
  • Cleaning chairs and replacing soiled chair covers
  • Recovering of ottomans

We're excited to start this much needed update. To that end we're seeking your feedback on the type of task chairs to purchase!

We'll be offering test drives of four potential chairs the week of January 27th and will be gathering student feedback. Stop by the library on the following dates to test the chairs, vote, and treat yourself to some light snacks provided by the library.

Test Drive Times

  • Tuesday, January 28th, 11 am - 2pm
  • Wednesday, January 29th, 11 am - 2pm
  • Thursday, January 30th, 11 am - 2pm

Read & Publish

Inforgraphic showing Read and Publish discount usage as of January 2025.

The UT Health San Antonio Libraries is involved in multiple Read and Publish agreements that have helped save $197,910 for faculty publishing in open access journals. The savings come from discounted article processing charges (APCs) or waived article processing charges.

Read and Publish agreements designed to support both authors and the broader community by facilitating the publication of high-quality, peer-reviewed open access content. Also referred to as a transformative agreement, the Read-and-Publish model combines payments for both reading access and publishing fees into a single contract, eliminating publication costs for authors choosing to publish in open access. In open access journals, the publication costs are borne by the author or authors as Article Processing Charges (APCs) which can run from (need a range here). When a library enters a transformative agreement, the APCs may be waived altogether or is discounted resulting in savings for the author or authors.

The Scholarly Kitchen, a scholarly communications blog, defines transformative agreements as “a contract is a transformative agreement if it seeks to shift the contracted payment from a library or group of libraries to a publisher away from subscription-based reading and towards open access publishing.” If you are interested in learning more about open access and transformative agreements, check out this blog post - Transformative Agreements: A Primer - The Scholarly Kitchen.

As of January 2025, the library has agreements with 11 platforms, granting access to more than 5,500 journal titles. Of the 11 transformative agreements, six are negotiated as part of the UT System and five are negotiated independently.

Benefits for authors

  • Take advantage of an institutional agreement that covers your Open Access publishing fee or provides a discount

  • Publish under a creative commons license to determine how readers can use your article

  • Increase visibility for your research, leading to higher citations, wider reach and global impact.

The Library's Role

UT Health San Antonio Libraries proactively support transformative agreements with publishers when the agreement is financially viable and provides the faculty with comprehensive open publishing options.

Transformative agreements also foster community stewardship through open access and shift away from paid subscriptions that place published research articles behind paywalls. In addition, these agreements help faculty who have research grants which may require the publication of research in an open-access journal.

The Libraries do not currently fund article processing charges (APCs), however we encourage UT Health San Antonio affiliates to take advantage of existing APC discounts.

For more information on publishing discounts, including available journal titles and publishing details, see our Read and Publish site.

If your academic department wants to learn more about Read and Publish, librarians are available to present workshops or do departmental presentations – contact your library liaison.

Featured eBook of the Month

How to Do Research: And How to Be a Researcher

Robert Stewart

Book Description from the Publisher

There are many textbooks on research methods, plenty of books on popular science, and specialist texts on a whole range of academic fields. However, few bring these together as a framework for a career involving research, and few attempt a practical appraisal of the challenges and opportunities involved in being 'a researcher'. 

Here, the principles underlying humanity's past and continuing acquisition of knowledge are illustrated across a variety of academic fields, from history to quantum physics - telling stories of clever and inventive people with good ideas, but also of personalities, politics, and power. 

This book draws together these strands to provide an informal and concise account of knowledge acquisition in all its guises. Having set out what research hopes to achieve, and why we are all researchers at heart, early chapters describe the basic principles underlying this - ways of thinking which may date back to the philosophers of the Athenian marketplace but are still powerful influences on the way research is carried out today. 

Drawing on a broad range of disciplines, Stewart takes the reader well beyond the pure 'scientific method', which might work well enough in physics or chemistry but falls apart in life sciences, let alone humanities. Later chapters consider the realities of carrying out research and the ways in which these continue to shape its progress - researchers and their personalities, their employers, funding, publication, political forces, and power structures.

Robert Stewart is a Professor of Psychiatric Epidemiology and Clinical Informatics at King’s College London. He has led, taught, and thought about research for more than 25 years at King’s College London and the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Maudsley Biomedical Research Centre.

Check out the book through EBSCOhost eBook Collection, provided by the Briscoe Library.


Each month, we feature an ebook from our collections. Our goal is to feature titles of interest to students, faculty, staff, and alumni. If you have a title you would like to recommend, please let us know by emailing Kelley Minars at minars@uthscsa.edu