Open Access Week Is October 22-28, 2012

Open Access Week Is October 22-28, 2012.

We wrote last month about Open Access: Its Future and Academic Libraries.  The last full week of October is designated as Open Access Week, an initiative to educate about and promote open access journals.  From the  Open Access Week website:

Open Access Week, a global event now entering its sixth year, is an opportunity for the academic and research community to continue to learn about the potential benefits of Open Access, to share what they’ve learned with colleagues, and to help inspire wider participation in helping to make Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research.

“Open Access” to information – the free, immediate, online access to the results of scholarly research, and the right to use and re-use those results as you need – has the power to transform the way research and scientific inquiry are conducted. It has direct and widespread implications for academia, medicine, science, industry, and for society as a whole.

Some open access resources:

• Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) – Search or browse open access quality-controlled journals.
• OAIster – Now an OCLC WorldCat catalog of millions of open access resources.
• Open Archives Initiative – Develops and promotes standards to facilitate the efficient dissemination of scholarly content including OAI-PMH and OAI-ORE.
• Registry of Open Access Repositories – Search or browse repositories by country, system type, repository type, and deposit activity.
• SHERPA/RoMEO – Classifies (by color) and describes publishers’ general policies on self-archiving of journal articles.
• Wikipedia – Introductory information and background article on Open Access.

Some useful open access journal sites:

• Bentham Open – Over 230 peer-reviewed open access journals in science, technology, medicine, and social sciences.
• Cloud Journals – Open access e-journals in science, technology, engineering, medicine, art, humanities, and management.
• International Scientific Publications – Five peer-reviewed open access journals in science.
• Journal of Digital Humanities – Quarterly peer-reviewed, open access humanities journal.
• Libertas Academica – Open access peer-reviewed medical and scientific Journals site based in New Zealand.
• MDPI – A platform for over 70 peer-reviewed, scientific open access journals.
• PLOS – Publishes seven peer-reviewed open-access journals in a variety of scientific disciplines.
• SAGE Open – Peer-reviewed, gold open access journal.
• Springer Open – Hundreds of peer-reviewed open access STM journals in BioMed Central and Chemistry Central.

Resources for open access repository software:

• Digital Commons – A hosted open access digital repository service by bepress.
• DSpace – Open source software to build open digital repositories.
• Open Journal Systems – Locally-hosted online journal publishing software from the Public Knowledge Project with a list of journals.
• OpenDOAR – A directory of 0ver 2,000 open access academic repositories.

Peter Suber, Director of the Harvard Open Access Project, has just published a book titled simply Open Access.  Read the book description and a preview on the MIT Press website.

Visit the Open Access Week website for more information.

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Open Access: Its Future and Academic Libraries

An open access (OA) paper titled Moving towards an open access future: the role of academic libraries (PDF) was just released as the result of an international librarian roundtable hosted by the British Library and SAGE International.

Open access refers to freely-available peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles.  There are two forms of open access:

• Gold OA – The author(s) or institution(s) pays for the article to be published openly.
• Green OA – Articles are accepted to a repository and access is paid for by the user.

The paper suggested ways that open access will affect academic libraries and change the role of the research librarian.  Open access means users may rely less on library resources and librarian mediation.  One way librarians are increasing their profile at their institution is by managing the institutional repository.  Main functions still will be information literacy and providing research advice.

Open access could affect library budgets.  If the gold OA model is more widely used, costs would shift to the departments of the publishing authors and away from libraries which typically pay subscription fees for access.

Librarians’ experience with metadata will prove important with open access.  Libraries will “compete” with better data and providing better access:

Scaled up OA also challenges the traditional role of collection development for librarians, and it raises the question of how universities can compete with each other on the basis of their libraries if the resources and tools are almost the same. One participant noted that the quality of library provision will be one of the benchmarking issues in the future, rather than the number of books or journals that a library holds.

Download and read the paper Moving towards an open access future: the role of academic libraries (PDF).