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.

Finding Free Images and Clip Art

Today I taught a workshop on finding free photos and clip art as part of our Learn Something Quick series.

Below are some of the websites I highlighted:

• Creative Commons: Open Clip Art Library
  
• Free Digital Photos
  
• iStockphoto
  
• Microsoft Clip Art
  Photoshop Tutorials Blog: Free Stock Photos (Lists many stock photo sites, including the popular Stock.xchng and Morguefile sites.)
  
• Wikimedia Commons

Google's Advanced Image Search allows individuals to look for images with varying degrees of copyright restrictions. For example, searches can be limited to images "labeled for reuse," "labeled for commercial reuse," "labeled for reuse with modification," and "labeled for reuse with commercial modification." Naturally, the default to all image searches is the all-inclusive "not filtered by license."

Information-literate individuals understand the legal and ethical issues surrounding information. Google also knows about these sticky concerns. On their Features: Usage Rights page they have included the following information:

Anyone can browse the Web, but usage rights come into play if you're looking for content that you can take and use above and beyond fair use. Site owners can use licenses to indicate if and how content on their sites can be reused.

When looking at photos, keep your eyes open for the licensing information. On the sites listed above, these notices generally appear in a visible spot near the photo.

Cognizance and ability to correctly (read legally here) apply copyright and license information relate to the last information-literacy competency standard, espoused by the Association of College and Research Librarians (ACRL). Namely:

Understand the economic, legal, and social issues surrounding the use of information, and access and use information ethically and legally.

Best wishes as you search for free photos, images, clip art, and other files.