Open Access & Scholarly Communication
A subject that is coming up in more and more of my classes, from collections development to reference, is scholarly communication and the open access movement. In fact, I have a whole class devoted to open access coming up this summer... by the end of it I hope I will be more on top of things!
There are many reasons why I'm interested in this - copyright issues, peer review implications, the removal of barriers to information (through prohibitive costs and/or the need for user authentication) and the like. Most importantly, there is all this information out there that I was only peripherally aware of and I want to find out more about it!
I'm curious as to how this subject is being received. I know there are some information/institutional repositories out there that have been existence for quite some time, and are heavily used, particularly relating to scientific pre-prints and e-prints, but what are you finding in other disciplines? Are information repositories sources that you direct students to? Do students know these resources are even out there? Is this an area currently more suited to faculty members and professional researchers?
Closer to home for me, UBC is getting ready to launch its own information repository (known as cIRcle - https://circle.ubc.ca/), although it is currently available in pilot mode. Graduate students are submitting theses and dissertations electronically, faculties from the sciences, the arts, and education have begun mounting their work, and resources from the library and UBC Press are also available.
Open access is gaining momentum, and I'd like to know what others think. How do you take advantage of the open access upswing?
posted by Krista @ 10:38 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:
As a reference librarian, I'm most interested in how to actually find and access scholarship, regardless of how it is published. So I think your key question is "do students know these resources are even out there?" I believe the answer is usually "no." So perhaps this is where tools like Google Scholar and OAIster will take on an added power and importance in our work.
Repositories are great for archival purposes, but of course, searchers have to know that the papers exist in the first place before they go about finding where they might be stored. It defeats the whole purpose of "open access" if the literature is not easily discoverable!
I forgot to add that McGill has recently launched an institutional repository, too: http://www.mcgill.ca/library-findinfo/escholarship/
The National Institute of Health has recently instituted a policy that requires that all researchers who receive NIH funding submit the products of their research to PubMed Central, the NIH's free digital archive. In terms of open access, this is a big deal, and probably an indication of where things are going.
And as for access, open access literature is in many ways easier to find. One of the main selling points of institutional repositories and OA journals is that their contents are freely available online and indexed by the major search engines [and they also tend to (drastically) increase exposure and citation numbers].
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