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:

•  Hindawi Publishing: a rapidly growing publisher with more than 200 open-access journals
• PLoS ONE: the world's largest journal.

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:

• Open Access Week
• SPARC: Scholarly Publishers and Academic Resources Coalition
• SPARC Newsletter
• Education Podcasts on OA
• Vimeo's Open Access Videos

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.

Information Literacy Outcomes

It seems like the following might be appropriate outcomes of for a course intending to teach students how to become information literate. I tried to incorporate Bloom's Taxonomy, so you ought to be able to insert "I" or "I can" before each of the bullets below. The link to Bloom's Taxonomy takes you to a website with the taxonomy, including verbs that you can insert into questions to focus students on develop that level of thinking.

* understand the differences between scholarly and popular sources.
* know how to access scholarly sources.
* describe ways to narrow down a topic in order to write a manageable paper.
* create an annotated bibliography.
* evaluate sources and explain why they are or are not useful for a given purpose, such as arguing a point/thesis in a paper.
* apply criteria for evaluating information sources.
* understand why information needs to be cited.
* explain why some information costs money to access and other information does not. ~ Explain why information is not equal in its quality or demand.
* show how to mold a topic into a research question.
* understand when it may be necessary to seek help from a librarian/information professional.
* identify the differences between a catalog and an index.

What other outcomes would you expect to come out of a semester-long course that incorporated information literacy?

Recommended Information Literacy Videos

This afternoon I came across a blog with some new videos that might be of interest to you: Information Literacy meets Library 2.0/. One video describes the differences between scholarly journals and magazines. Another talks about the difference between Google and databases. The last one discusses the differences between respectable newspapers and tabloids.

I like how the two librarians square off against each other in these debates, and I like their British accents, though at times they vary their volumes/inflections so that I have a hard time hearing and the one on the right (Pete?) is so soft spoken that it is often hard to hear him.

As far as humor goes, they are lacking in that department, but the videos are still well done and thought out. Librarians who give instruction might consider using these videos to teach their students some of the information-literacy basics. Be forewarned, though, that the databases your library uses may differ from the ones used by Al and Pete at their library.

Open Access Study

In this month's issue of College & Research Libraries Kristi L. Palmer, Emily Dill, and Charlene Christie discuss their research study on librarian attitudes regarding open access: "Where There's a Will There's a Way?: Survey about Open Access."

"This study indicates that librarians support the concepts of open access and, more important, believe that these concepts are related to their work as librarians" (328). This observation did not surprise me as I had suspected as much, but they did point out that while librarians are in favor of open access initiatives, they do not do very much to make any changes or educate others about the issues surrounding it.

Librarians are in favor of seeing their profession take some actions toward open access. The most highly supported behaviors were those that extend traditional library activities such as educating faculty about open access and providing a means by which to locate open access items. Indeed, involvement in education campaigns was not only highly supported, but those librarians managing education campaigns also had significantly more supportive attitudes than other respondents.

It seems to me that librarians should be talking more about open-access issues with each other and with other academics in their communities. The survey said that librarians talk more about this issue among themselves than with faculty and staff. Not surprisingly, educating campus constituents about open access was perceived as a more favorable activity than advocating changes in publishing and tenure policies, such as encouraging faculty to publish in open-access venues, keep their copyrights, place "pre-published versions" of papers in institutional repositories, etc.

On an information-literacy level, the authors of this study sent the survey out in the summer of 2006. It seems that the data might be a little aged. How have open-access issues changed in the past three or four years? How have academic librarians changed their attitudes regarding open access? Have they?

Still, it seems that librarians could do more to educate others about open access and provide more helps on how to find the publications that are freely accessible.

Palmer, Kristi L., Emily Dill, and Charlene Christie. "Where There's a Will There's a Way?: Survey of Academic Librarian Attitudes about Open Access." College & Research Libraries 70.4 (July 2009): 315-35.

Want to subscribe to a magazine or journal?

In the last week I have recommended ulrichsweb.com to two different individuals. The first called while I was at the Reference Desk. He wanted to know how he could set up his own personal subscriptions to some education journals. The second wanted to know if we had access to Art Journal and how he might start up a subscription.

Ulrichsweb.com takes you to Ulrich's Periodicals Directory. You may browse magazines and journals, or search for a specific title. You can do a keyword search, exact title search, or keyword within the title search. For most individuals the exact title search might prove to be the most useful.

Once you find the expanded record of a particular periodical, you will be able to discover if it is peer reviewed (they use the term "refereed"), its price, number of subscriptions (circulation), its publisher, contact information, its web address, its frequency (weekly, bimonthly, quarterly, annually, etc.), its language, its editor, and so forth. It also provides the different names it has had through the years.

Some students and professors want to know for sure if a periodical is peer reviewed, so this resource provides just that. I also noticed in the EBSCOhost interface on pages that provide links to the issues of a particular magazine or journal it also say if the periodical is peer reviewed or refereed.

How do you know if it's a scholarly journal?

Have you ever had this question? At Idaho State University a particular Biology 101 class is required to do several assignments to familiarize themselves with library resources. One of the questions asks that they find a peer-reviewed journal and make a photocopy of an article from our collection of printed journals or print out a full-text version of an article in a database. We use EBSCOHost interfaces and databases, so it can be easy to tell students just to check the box that says "Scholarly (Peer-Reviewed) Journals" when they begin a search or click on the link that says "Academic Journals" once the computer returns its results.

I am never quite satisfied with that answer, because it seems that students may find a book review within an academic journal, but this would not satisfy the criteria for their assignment. Typically, scholarly journals do not have flashy covers, but when students are working at a computer workstation they cannot see the journal/magazine covers. Scholarly articles generally contain a colon in the title, separating the general topic from its particular focus. Ex: "Eating disorder not otherwise specified in an inpatient unit: the impact of altering the DSM-IV criteria for anorexia and bulimia nervosa."

What should students know when they are looking for scholarly, peer-reviewed journals? The Idaho State University reference and instruction librarians have developed a web page that walks students through the decision-making process and compares the scholarly right next to the popular. It can be a great start for students who are puzzled about the matter.

On the other hand, if they want to know right now [post haste] it might be best to point them to Ulrichsweb.com where they can find a quick answer. I conducted a quick search a few minutes ago on "anorexia nervosa." It returned thousands of results; I had not specified any limitations on the search, but I found a journal title to check, Philosophy, Psychiatry & Psychology. I quickly copied and pasted it into the Ulrichsweb.com search box, pressed enter, and it returned lots of options. Of course, this scared me at first. "Oh no, I don't know how to do this. I didn't do it right." However, on looking more closely at the results I found the desired title down low on the list. I don't know why it returned those other results, but once I selected the proper title it took me to a detailed record of the serial in question. One of the fields is titled "Refereed" and for this particular serial it say "Yes." I tried Ulrichsweb.com today for the first time; for some reason I thought that I would have to consult the paper version. Talk about scary--using a printed index!!! No worries, though, because the Head of Reference says Ulrichs will no longer be selling the print version; it will all be online. Sounds like good news for students, professors, and librarians.

Hopefully I can remember to point students to the Ulrichsweb.com site in the future. We do subscribe to it. We have it on our list of databases at least. That's what I have to say about knowing whether or not a source is scholarly or not--at least today. Perhaps someone, someday will comment on this blog. What do I need to do to get people to read my stuff? I believe my entries contain useful information and questions; one reason I think they will be useful down the road is that I should be able to include them in my portfolio for evaluation. This may or may not be true, but I consider it to be a teaching log to include in my personal teaching portfolio at least.


This blog really does prepare me to answer students' questions. It affords me the opportunity to articulate my ideas in words that can then be expressed later. Sometimes I do rather well communicating ideas on the spur of the moment, but other times I fail miserably. My level of effectiveness increases when I first write down/type my ideas, because it forces me to organize my ideas into words that make sense in an understandable pattern/order.