Information Literacy Class Progresses

The one-credit course I am teaching this semester is an information-literacy course.  Its official name is ACAD 1199: Information Research.  We have now finished week 5.  I have a Google Sites page that offers a bit more information about this class.  That page has a number of links to my syllabus, outlines, worksheets, and more.  Take a look at it, and let me know what you think.

Are you teaching or taking such a course?  What do you do when you teach it?

I also have a couple of presentations posted there.  One that I enjoyed making talks about the differences between catalogs and indexes (Catalog vs. Index).  For more information on this topic see my blog post "Catalog vs. Index."  It continues to be one of the most viewed blog posts that I have written.

Today we talked about Ulrich's Periodicals Directory, which is a useful source for discovering if a journal is peer-reviewed or not.  It may be better to say that it will tell you if articles in a journal are refereed or peer reviewed; these two terms are synonymous.  We also talked about how to find the full text of an article, using the resources at Idaho State University. 

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.

Evaluating E-mails, Urban Myths, and Legends

Not too long ago I received a forwarded email that warned me about solicitors being able to contact me via my cell phone. It said that I should contact the Do Not Call Registry to place my cell phone number on the list before a specific date, so telemarketers would not call on my cell phone. From experience I decided to double-check this information on Snopes.com, and I learned that the claim made in the email was "false."

The website even provided examples of the false email, how it originated, and information about cell phone directories. It mentions that cell-phone providers must gain permission from their customers before they can list their cell-phone numbers in a directory. Cell phone users may still choose to put their phone numbers on the Do Not Call Registry; however, this may not be necessary, because Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulations already block nearly all telemarketers' phone calls.

New legislation was passed in 2007 that made it so your phone number on the Do Not Call Registry will not expire after 5 years; this according to the Federal Trade Commission.

How can we trust Snopes.com? This site includes hyperlinks to other sites that verify their information, and they also include a list of references with each entry. If you receive emails that detail dire situations and call you to act immediately, then you might consider verifying that information to find out if it is true or false. It might be a rumor.

Of course, it is also important to check out the sources, or the authors of a site to look at its authoritative nature. Barbara and David P. Mikkelson created the website, and you can learn more about them through this Wikipedia article.

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.