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By Gary Price: The following article appears in the Vol 39 No 1 (2013) issue of The Journal of Academic Librarianship. This special issue of JAL is devoted to open access. and is available at no charge. Title Publishing in Discipline-Specific Open Access Journals: Opportunities and Outreach for Librarians Abstract: Open access (OA) journals promote the opportunity for peer-reviewed journal articles to be freely accessible. In recent years, the number of OA journals has exploded in all disciplines. Previous studies have identified print-based pedagogical discipline-specific journals outside the field of Library and Information Science (LIS) for librarians to consider as vehicles for publishing articles related to subject-based Information Literacy (IL). The present study explores the presence of discipline-specific pedagogical journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and presents a table of OA journals with their acceptance rates and review times. Pedagogical OA journals are highlighted as a potential opportunity for librarians to pro-actively reach out to faculty within a discipline and contribute towards the OA movement.
Full text: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=MiamiImageURL&_cid=272069&_user=10&_pii=S0099133312001760&_check=y&_origin=article&_zone=toolbar&_coverDate=2013-Jan-31&view=c&originContentFamily=serial&wchp=dGLzVlt-zSkWz&md5=25b1f0671652c3674fea4aa12b0093e1&pid=1-s2.0-S0099133312001760-main.pdf
Manka S Angwafo: Making educational resources freely available will fast-track the continent's development. Of more than 2 000 open access repositories worldwide, fewer than 3% are in Africa. And there are even fewer exclusively from sub-Saharan Africa. Even though the availability of open access material is low, it is important to recognise the progress that has been made over the past decade: several institutions across the region have adopted and are implementing open access policies. However, in spite of these strides, only about 16% of African scholars claim to have a high awareness of e-resources. Much more advocacy is necessary for open access to become a reality across the continent. Africa stands to gain the most from the open access movement. But factors such as the continent's regulatory environments, the changing role of librarians, weak commitment to institutionalising open access and problems of sustainability have made implementation slow and awareness limited.
Exploring the potential impact of open access on the librarian and their role within the institution. "...the future of open access for libraries will involve: More advanced discovery services
Communication, training and networking with own institutional community
Repository building and curation
And to further summarise the above, they all point at developing a strong(er) service culture to look at end-users’ needs directly, rather than focusing on pure collection building. Not by coincidence, these themes are echoed in a paper presented in May 2012 by Lorcan Dempsey (Vice President and Chief Strategist at OCLC), which are nicely summarized on the OCLC’s website. It is easy to apply each of these points to the current and future OA landscape: “Education, local government, and publishing are being reshaped by economic and networking pressures. Changes here will increasingly drive library changes and libraries need to understand those environments.
Libraries continue to shift from a collection-based view to a service-based view, with deeper engagement with the research, learning and information behaviors of their users.
Community engagement drives the need for new skills, more responsive organizational structures, and a readiness to reallocate resources to important areas.”
"This guide will help you move beyond the seemingly
simple question, “Is this journal open access?” and toward
a more productive alternative, “How open is it?”
Use it to:
• Understand the components that define Open Access
• Learn what makes a journal more open vs. less open
• Make informed decisions about where to publish
K. Thomas Pickard: "Traditionally, research papers undergo peer review before publication. Two trends, open access and social media, are changing the peer review process. E-patients must be aware that traditional peer review applies different criteria and methods than review through social media outlets. Although still developing, these review processes may affect the evaluation of research quality."
Via HaBIc, Guus van den Brekel
The European Library offers services and facilities of direct relevance to research communities in Europe and beyond.
Via João Greno Brogueira
A Day in the life of an “OER Librarian" looking for user-friendly collections of open textbooks (via @OER_center) Sleslie: To [...] find some suitable Open Textbook alternatives for a collaborative program in ICT here in BC, and I wanted to reflect on this process and this potential role of “OER Librarian.”
Via Andreas Link
The Law School Library added roughly 3000 faculty-published scholarly articles from legal journals to an open access database on its website over the past year — giving it the largest online repository of its kind.
Learn. Share. Advance Open Access Week, a global event now entering its fourth year, is an opportunity for the academic and research community to continue to 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. Open Access (OA) has the potential to maximize research investments, increase the exposure and use of published research, facilitate the ability to conduct research across available literature, and enhance the overall advancement of scholarship. Research funding agencies, academic institutions, researchers and scientists, teachers, students, and members of the general public are supporting a move towards Open Access in increasing numbers every year. Open Access Week is a key opportunity for all members of the community to take action to keep this momentum moving forward. Get involved. Participating in Open Access Week can be as simple or involved as you like. It can also be a chance to let your imagination have full rein and come up with something more ambitious, wacky, fun. OA Week is an invaluable chance to connect the global momentum toward open sharing with the advancement of policy changes on the local level. Universities, colleges, research institutes, funding agencies, libraries, and think tanks have used Open Access Week as a platform to host faculty votes on campus open-access policies, to issue reports on the societal and economic benefits of Open Access, to commit new funds in support of open-access publication, and more.
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If you are a librarian and do not know who Aaron Swartz is, that should probably change now. He helped developing the RSS standard, was the co-founder of Reddit, worked on the Open Library project, downloaded and freed 20% (2.7 million documents) of the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) database that charges fees for the United States federal court documents, out of which about 1,600 had privacy issues, played a lead role in preventing the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and wrote the Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto.
(Photo from Wikipedia)
by AUDREY WATTERS: "...the year’s major ed-tech developments. I’ve identified the 10 trends that I think have been 2012’s most interesting and important. I’ll string out the posts that cover these over the next 6 weeks — and not just because it’s time for the obligatory-end-of-year-wrap-up-crap posts that we bloggers churn out throughout the month of December. I find the reflection is useful (although time-consuming), and it’s a good process for me to go through all the news and all my writing to assess what’s innovative and what’s hype and what's changed and why."
Open Access will save on more than just journal subscription costs. "[...] as more and more scholarly content becomes available online and open access, the need for academic library acquisitions departments will decrease dramatically. This change will have an added benefit for libraries, for in addition to saving money on subscription costs, they will also reap savings from no longer having to bear the salary costs of those involved in collection development, ordering, and licensing library materials. In most academic libraries, collection development and acquisitions departments are still organized in much the same way they were in the print era."
Via Pavlinka Kovatcheva
This blog is to provide information to University of Melbourne Library staff. Jennie Johnson, TBI Communications: "Today, InTech – an Open Access (OA) publisher – has published the results of a survey appraising attitudes and awareness of the library community towards the OA business model in scholarly publishing. The survey results suggest that although librarians have a good level of awareness and knowledge of OA, they believe their research communities are much less aware. Their work to educate their communities is hampered by lack of informational support materials. Librarians remain broadly supportive of OA and the vast majority already feel the benefits of the model are being realized, or will be realized in the future. Despite this support, librarians in our sample were not actively involved in managing OA funds centrally, indeed, almost half were unaware of how OA charges are funded within their institution. The greatest concern librarians have with OA center on the article processing charges being set too high. There is generally less concern with the quality of peer review or the potential incentive for publishers to focus on quantity over quality. Less than a quarter of librarians were concerned that OA could make their role and the services provided by the library less visible. Indeed, librarians see a strong future for the profession becoming more closely integrated with their research communities as a partner, educator and innovator. For the full survey results summary, please visit: http://www.intechopen.com/open-access-su…;
By Amanda Young: NEWS: Robert Darnton discusses future of libraries http://t.co/XUPL1y55... 'Despite a number of obstacles, the Digital Public Library of America, an open-access digital library, is projected to launch in April 2013, making the United States’ cultural heritage available worldwide, according to Robert Darnton, a Harvard University professor and the director of the Harvard University Library. Darnton spoke in Filene Auditorium in Monday’s inaugural Donoho Colloquium titled “The Digital Public Library of America and the Digital Future.”
"The Global Open Access Portal (GOAP), aiming at presenting a top level view of Open Access to scientific information, was launched at a special side event organized during the UNESCO General Conference, on Tuesday 1 November 2011, at Paris Headquarters. The portal has country reports from over 148 countries with weblinks to over 2000 initiatives/projects in Member States. The GOAP is a knowledge portal that has the following features: Country-wise distilled knowledge on the status of Open Access Key organizations engaged in OA in Member States Thematic focus areas of OA Important publications on OA coming from different regions of the world Critical assessment of major barriers to OA in each country Potential of OA in UNESCO Member States Funding and deposit mandates Links to OA initiatives in the world
Librarians have played a crucial, leading role in advocating for Open Access worldwide. As a traditional focal point for scholarly communication innovation, libraries continue to exercise their leadership by encouraging faculty members, administrators, and students to engage in Open Access Week activities.
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Birmingham City University library's use of Aurasma to provide useful and timely information, plus tutorials to its customers. Via @sallyheroes