Summing Up the Findings

The purpose of this blog was to record my research progress on peer-reviewed open access and licensed resource issues with reference to serials and databases in academic library settings. The goal was to describe interesting aspects within this field of information resources and describe relevant historical and current circumstances. The content was organized sequentially by the following entry topics: literature review and methodology, data analysis, discussion and conclusion.

I want to mention some of the interesting advantages I found in publishing this in a blog format (per the assignment) rather than in a more typical non-published essay paper. When you realize the content will go live to the public there is an even increased striving to be as clear and as accurate as possible in order to not be misleading to anyone who may have stumbled upon the blog. In addition, the entire feeling of the experience is much more alive since the audience for the content is not make believe. This created a greater sense of usefulness for the entire project and gives it a much greater value for me.

Open access initiatives, aggregators, gateways, vendors, publishers, researchers and libraries all have a vested interest in getting their content to the public. They are all in some way content providers. Libraries’ interests include providing the most access to the best resources possible and in the most organized efficient user-friendly way possible. If people are publishing helpful resources for free then you can see the desire to be helpful in seeing them reach the public. So far we see that on some level that can be done while maintaining expensive paid-for resources.

However they are provided, electronic journals are some of the most highly-priced resources on campus, and are among the most frequently used by both staff and students. Researchers and research institutions relying on receiving grants for research have a vested interest in publishing and insuring their research has the greatest impact. Because this is not a primarily monetary motive it makes sense that some or all of this excellent content will continue to find business models that allow the content to be provided reliably as open access.

Open access initiatives are offering hope that new and creative solutions within business models will fund the publication of online content without creating access barriers and prohibitive costs. "Those with an interest in disseminating the content pay the production costs upfront so that access can be free... "(Suber, 2006).

Open access progress is inspiring the development of XML and interoperability standards which are benefiting accessibility for all online content. "There is now open-source software for building and maintaining OAI-compliant archives and worldwide momentum for using it" (Suber, 2006).

It is important to note that when something is free, typically you can’t complain about it and you have no power of input or communication. For example, you may find that a free pdf is incomplete in random places. Even when a user is motivated to provide feedback, they may have no ear since there may be no staff paid to listen. This is a major concern I have with a library being dependant on free content. It is also a concern I have that students will continue to abandon the much greater volume of paid resources with the idea that it can be replaced by an apparently much more narrow body of work that is free. Work in developing licensed and open access resources is still in full-bloom and there are a lot of unknowns and future plans.

Personally I believe it is a lot of fun to go to the Directory of Open Access Journals and easily open a peer-reviewed article. We are free to email this to our mom or share it with any of our friends. When it is a non-issue whether or not one is hooked into a library card system, access to knowledge is increased. Anyone can have access to an article and can share it without any fear of infringing on a complicated licensing agreement. This breaks out of the regimen of access being available only to the few who can afford it. Breaking that barrier is an infinitely powerful tool for the health, wealth and growth of any society.

"OA dramatically increases the number of potential users of any given article by adding those users who would otherwise have been unable to access it because their institution could not afford the access-tolls of the journal in which it appeared; therefore, it stands to reason that OA can only increase both usage and impact" (Brody, 2004, para. 10).

Hopefully the branching out into new business models for paying for resources will ultimately create more functional solutions and people may even say one day – what were licensed resources and open access resources? Hopefully they will be shocked at how complicated things were before, and relieved at how much more workable publishing is at that future time.

Reference:
Brody, T. and Harnad, S. (2004) Comparing the Impact of Open Access (OA) vs. Non-OA Articles in the Same Journals. D-Lib Magazine, 10 (6).

Suber, P. (2006). “Open Access Overview.” http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm