Thursday, February 3, 2011

Finding Open Access Scholarship and Information about Open Access

I completed a display on open access publishing today.  I learned that researchers at ISU can find open access journals via our A-Z Journal List.  For example, a search for Communications in Information Literacy will return a page like this:
The green hyperlinks take users to the Communications in Information Literacy homepage, where a username and password is required to access their articles, but it is still free.

Anyone can find and use open-access (OA) journals.  To browse and search OA journals, take a look at the Directory of Open Access Journals, which is also known as the DOAJ.   Take a look at Mallikarjun Dora's post on the "Growth of DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals)."  The post includes a useful graph to visualize the increase in the number of journals available with open access research articles.

Even more open-access articles can be found on the following sites:
For more information about open access, look at the Galter Health Sciences Library's "Open Access Resources Guide."  This library serves the Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine.

Most of the information I gathered came from Peter Suber's "Overview of Open Access."  Find definitions and learn the differences between Gratis OA and Libre OA.  It is really quite a useful site if you want to understand more about OA, copyright, Creative Commons, etc.


Other useful sites on the topic include, though certainly are not limited to:
The head of our acquisition's department says that scholarly journal inflation rates typically rise 9%  each year.  Normal inflation tends to be just 3% each year.  Some scholarly journals cost as much as a brand new car.
 
See here. 

In a good year when academic library budgets do not get cut, it may still mean some academic journals get axed, due to the high inflation rate.  Perhaps this is why many librarians have begun to promote open access publishing, inviting professors to retain their copyrights and initiating institutional repositories to retain access to the research created by their own researchers.

Have you been involved in the open access movement?  How?  

Do you publish in open-access journals?  Why?

Have you negotiated your copyright with publishers?  How did that go?

Below is a Wordle image highlighting the words used in this post.

1 comment:

Spencer said...

Open Access Initiatives in Scholarly Communications: Getting your University on Board

February 16-17, 2011

Hosted by Adrian Ho and Sarah Shreeves

Please join us for an e-forum discussion. It’s free and open to everyone!
Registration information is at the end of the message.

Each day, sessions begin and end at:
Pacific: 7am – 3pm
Mountain: 8am – 4pm
Central: 9am – 5pm
Eastern: 10am – 6pm

Libraries have used various strategies to engage with faculty, students, and administrators around changes in the scholarly communication system. Open access (OA) has become a popular topic and different initiatives are built around it. These include launching institutional repositories, creating OA publishing funds, working with faculty and administrators to institute OA policies, and developing new OA journals in collaboration with scholars and students. How do these initiatives relate to libraries' mission and future roles in higher education? What strategies are used to implement these initiatives and how well have they worked? This ALCTS e-Forum will explore both how and why libraries have chosen to invest resources to support OA initiatives. It will also examine what strategies have been used and how successful they have been. All are welcome to join us to review and discuss what has been accomplished in libraries' OA endeavors.

Adrian Ho is Scholarly Communication Librarian at The University of Western Ontario. With assistance of his colleagues, he networks with different constituents on campus to explore avenues to open up scholarly content for broader access. Before landing in London, Ontario for his current job, Adrian worked in collection development and public services at different institutions in the U.S. and Canada.

Sarah Shreeves is currently the Coordinator for the Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (IDEALS), a set of services and collections supporting scholarly communication (including the institutional repository) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is also the Coordinator for the Scholarly Commons, a space for expert, interdisciplinary research support services and open workshops for faculty and graduate students to develop skills in areas such as digital content creation, e-learning and teaching, working with digital repositories, curation of research data, understanding copyright issues and author rights, and working with geospatial and numeric data.

*What is an e-forum?*
An ALCTS e-forum provides an opportunity for librarians to discuss matters of interest, led by a moderator, through the e-forum discussion list. The e-forum discussion list works like an email listserv: register your email address with the list, and then you will receive messages and communicate with other participants through an email discussion. Most e-forums last two to three days. Registration is necessary to participate, but it's free. See a list of upcoming e-forums at: http://bit.ly/upcomingeforum.

*To register:*
Instructions for registration are available at: http://bit.ly/eforuminfo. Once you have registered for one e-forum, you do not need to register again, unless you choose to leave the email list. Participation is free and open to anyone.