The Reduced-Cost Journals Service was developed under a larger two-year grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for library support in Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Sabre later added Bulgaria and Croatia at the request of local partners. The Service was launched on a pilot basis in the Czech Republic during 1993, with the help of the Prague Institute of Advanced Studies, and the full program began in 1994 for the 1995-97 subscription years. It provides reduced-cost subscriptions to journals in science, technology and medicine, which are especially valued by libraries in Eastern Europe and the FSU. Sabre secured agreements from eleven important U.S. and European commercial publishers of scientific journals for three-year discounts of at least 50 percent on more than 2,500 serial titles. The original five participants--Elsevier/Pergamon, Blackwell Scientific, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Springer-Verlag and John Wiley & Sons--were later joined by Butterworth Heinemann, Churchill Livingstone, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Institute for Scientific Information, IOS Press and VSP Science Publishers. The British subscription agency Blackwell's processed orders at a reduced fee, and the recipient libraries themselves made financial commit-ments of some $600,000. The pay-as-you-go feature is part of Sabre's effort to move its clients to market-based acquisitions.
Exhibition of large Sabre donation of scientific
literature at Central Library of Bulgarian Academy of Sciences,
with participation of U.S. Ambassador William Montgomery
After a three-year period of gratis subscriptions to 20 of its journals for over 20 libraries and institutions in Eastern Europe, the Baltic countries and Ukraine, U.K.-based Blackwell Publishers renewed the subscriptions through 1994 and increased to 36 the total number of gratis journals. These deal with the humanities and social sciences, subjects which tight library budgets in those countries often do not cover. Moreover, with the aid of external funding, the program was expanded on a paid basis to libraries in the Russian Federation, Ukraine and the Central Asian countries of Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic and Uzbekistan, at substantially reduced subscription prices.