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

Discussion and Conclusion (week four)

The idea of open access is not new. Ever since publishing began there have been various movements to provide content for free or for the least possible expense to the widest possible audience. And there was no time wasted with the development of the World Wide Web. The beginnings of the open access movement include the statement on open access by the Budapest Open Access Initiative in 2002 (http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml) which was met with skepticism and ridicule, with people on both sides of the fence contesting the reliability and affordability of the content (Friend, 2005, p.244).

There are varieties of collection development decisions, which include stability, authoritativeness, and accuracy. An additional collection management decision involves whether or not to include for example, a database where only a percentage of the content is free. Do you add it to your collection if half the content is free? Do you add it if only a particular section, like the news article, is free? These are decisions that are still being made. Each resource has to be explored and examined with respect to all of these aspects. A collection development plan has to be developed and put into play.

While we'd like to say one of the beauties of open access is that it evades all issues with licensing agreements. However it is not always quite that simple. Some free resources require the library to sign an agreement. These are typically non-negotiated agreements where one size is hoped to fit all or most users, and of course one size does not fit all. An agreement suitable for a single user on her private computer at home may not work for an academic library, a public library, a museum, historical society, a digital library, etc. Each of these users would be potentially seeing very different use. These issues are still being worked out on a case-by-case basis. This is one of the many tasks that will require management.

There are varieties of tasks required simply to keep the content alive online somewhere. To name a few: maintaining servers, links, interfaces, organization of the material, interoperability, scalability and interactions with end-user applications. And of course if one is going to go to all that trouble wouldn't it make sense to gather some usage statistics? Usage statistics are a vital tool in projecting management costs, allocating required staff time and gaining support. Both content providers and libraries have to work to set in place a standardized way to gather, provide and maintain those.

Collectively these tasks add up to significant staff time. And this is time that will continue for the lifetime of the product and will grow as the number of items grows. There are negotiations, decisions and protocols that need to be made with respect to archiving resources. Determining how to best proceed with the managing of growing digital resources is an interesting quandary.

It would be nice to think that free access is free, however the only one for whom it is truly free is the user. One could even argue that it is not free to them either, in that staff members are devoting time toward managing free resources. The fact is the licensed resource unit will in some way be supporting the open access resources. When there is an access issue it has to be determined if this is being offered free to anyone, or if this is a resource we are paying for and should be getting access to according to our licensing agreement and payment history.

Many times the payment history has to be sought. Sometimes the free electronic resources are intermingled with paid and licensed resources through the same website.

If it is found to be a free resource and the access is not available it is often the case that the URL has changed and the linking system has to be adapted. Having links that don't work or misrepresent availability by giving incorrect access date ranges creates just as much hassle, confusion and lack of confidence in the library website as licensed resources with the same problems. From the user's perspective the hassle is all coming from the same place, the library. So the more you have a system where the links aren't working, the more you have a system that people don’t trust or understand, and don’t want to rely on.

Occasionally a library will pay for a resource it is also receiving for free. For example, a cross-search in the academic library may provide three links to the same content, where one of the links goes to a free resource, one to a direct subscription for the journal and a third to an aggregator. There are several reasons for this. Sometimes it is the case that each link provides access to different years. In the case of both the free link and the aggregator the length and degree of access may be temporary, changing or unknown. A licensed aggregator is not necessarily required to offer these details. The library pays for the direct subscriptions for reliable access to the content, for rights to archive and use the content in various ways that best fit the needs of their users.

Reference:
Friend, F. J. (2005). "The open access future." El Profesional de la Información, jul/ago, Vol. 14 Issue 4, p244-245.

Data Analysis and Discussion (Week 3)

The growing popularity of the World Wide Web in the late 1990s and early 2000s provided the low-cost distribution technology needed for the creation of online journals. Both open access content and licensed content are experiencing a full-speed-ahead momentum, and libraries are finding ways to adopt and absorb the results.

The Directory of Open Access Journals provides content to 4184 journals among which, “currently 1538 journals are searchable at article level” (http://www.doaj.org, May 30, 2009). Searching by article title is possible via the directory when journal owners have supplied the directory with article metadata, which they are encouraged to do.

“There are approximately 21,000 active, peer-reviewed learned journals publishing about 1.4 million articles each year. About one million unique authors publish articles each year for a global audience of roughly 10–15 million readers located in about 10,000 institutions. The number of journals and articles continues to grow: each year the number of articles increases by 3%, the number of journals by about 3.5%. This growth has been relatively consistent over the last couple of hundred years. Its cause is surprisingly simple: the growth in the number of researchers in the world” (Mabe, 2006, p.56).



Given the volume and growth of this content, there is a sense of urgency among academic institutions and libraries to establish efficient functional protocols that will result in the most success for user access and at the least cost. One such protocol has been requiring contribution to open access depositories.

In 2007, Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences established a mandate requiring open access participation. The National Institutes of Health (NIH) established their mandate in 2008. Over a dozen other U.S. colleges and universities have mandates in the works (Van Orsdel, 2009, p.36).

While you can measure an obvious increase in the use of licensed online resources, a cost benefit analysis is not as readily available for open access content. For example, the University of Wisconsin-Madison has collected a few years of usage data for 80 different licensed resources. While availability of usage stats and costs differs between these two types of resources, there is evidence that open access usage could outpace licensed resources. "Ayris (2005) reported that articles in open access archives are from two to five times more likely to be cited and read than those in subscription sources" (Armstrong, 2006, p.5).

Open access resources can be much easier to link to and cite because they don’t use barriers. Licensed resources are required to enforce barriers in order to keep access routed to paid subscribers only. Open access content can be received by anyone, for example, by typing in the article title into Google. Also, once a user has the article, there aren't unexpected hoops to jump through with regard to printing, emailing, and copy/pasting limitations that may or may not be imposed on the licensed material.

However even though content is open access it may not be easy to access. Connecting to the resource via cross-linking and aggregator searches is aided by well-developed metadata within the content and the records of the content. The development of metadata strategies is in many ways at the core of the development of access to both open access and licensed resources.

The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) develops and promotes interoperability standards for metadata. While OAI had its roots in open access, its work aids interoperability of potentially any online resources as well. OAI's vision is "a network of rich services built from harvested structured information" (Lagoze, 2003, p.118). This vision relies on interoperable data coming from the local and publisher levels. The time-consuming process of adding and converting details into standard formats like XML pays off on the larger scale at the network level. Networking metadata relies heavily on standards associated with data transfers. At the network level, decisions have to be made about what will be easiest to maintain, for example combining "an OAI-PMH server in tandem with an existing Web server (e.g. Apache)..." (Lagoze, 2003, p.118).

The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) mandates that metadata should be compatible with Dublin Core in order to increase interoperability. The reality of the cost of preparing and integrating content for publishing was discussed in the 2006 Proceedings of the 6th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on digital libraries. One finding was that staff to implement Dublin Core and OAI-PMH and integrate them into NSDL was often actually one person working part time.

Funding for local data collections is not generally the same as that for grander scale projects where there is more likelihood that a profit can cover the costs. There is greater financial incentive in creating an automated harvesting model you could sell, than in administering a protocol for entering metadata for a collection of 5,000 local historical photographs. The problem is these two have to meet up somewhere on the Internet and they are each arriving at the table with very different implementation resources available to them.

References:
Armstrong, C. and Lonsdale, R. (2006). The E-Resources Management Handbook:A general overview of the e-resource industry. DOI:10.1629/9552448-0-3.1.1

Ayris, P., Evolution and Engagement: the landscape for Arts and Humanities in a digital age. Presentation at Open Access Debate: what is the future of scholarly communication? St Peter’s College, Oxford on Tuesday 21 June 2005.

Directory of Open Access Journals. http://www.doaj.org, May 30, 2009.

International Conference on Digital Libraries archive Proceedings of the 6th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital libraries. (2006). “Metadata Aggregation and ‘Automated Digital Libraries’: A Retrospective on the NSDL Experience.” session: Supporting education. p. 230 - 23. Chapel Hill, NC.

Lagoze, C. and Van de Sompel, H. (2003). “The making of the Open Archives Initiative protocol for metadata harvesting.” Library Hi Tech. Bradford. Vol. 21, Iss. 2.

Mabe, Michael. (2006). “(Electronic) Journal Publishing” The E-Resources Management Handbook. UKSG Publishing. http://uksg.metapress.com/openurl.asp?genre=article&id=doi:10.1629/9552448-0-3.6.1

Van Orsdel, L. C. and Born, K. (2009). "Reality Bites." Library Journal, Vol. 134 Issue 7, p36-40.

Methodology, Literature Review and Discussion (Week 2)

The methodology will be to start by researching relevant journal articles, books, and websites. These resources will mostly come from the course syllabus. I will also use resources which include audio/video resources, and blogs. Some of the answers and ideas will come from academic library staff. My notes will be entered using Google Docs and organized into edited content to be posted to the blog. The output will include a discussion of relevant data, quotes, and ideas. As stated earlier, all the content described will be posted weekly between June 16, 2009 to the end of July, 2009.

Now I would like to turn to an important debate about the development of open access resources. The controversy exists around a situation wherein tax dollars fund research at a university. The tax-funded research is then published by scholarly journals which charge publicly-funded libraries for access.

In this way taxpayers are charged for it twice (Russell, 2004, p.8). Of course this is an oversimplification. However, like many issues in this field, it brings up useful questions such as: What exactly happens to the research destined for open access? Do the researchers hand over a copy of the work for free to the publisher to edit? How much does it actually cost for the content to be published, maintained, and made accessible in various formats and venues? How much public funding actually goes to library
e-resource support? How much public funding actually went into the research?

In the book “Selecting and Managing Electronic Resources” by Vicki Gregory, a significant point is made that any free e-resources need to be investigated as to the reliability, accuracy and authoritativeness of the content, before being added to the collection. One can argue that these aspects are more consistently found in licensed resources where private financial investment is at stake.

Sometimes the impetus for providing open access content is fulfilled via institutional repositories. The use of these repositories has been recommended as a way to gather and "include digital multimedia, gray literature, learning objects, website capture, digitized special-collections materials, and perhaps even records management..." (Salo, 2008, p.23).

In the face of inhibiting situations such as when an author "will not sign licenses or handle deposits themselves" (Salo, 2008, p.23), Salo recommends that "Institutional repositories should seek forgiveness rather than permission from faculty" (Salo, 2008, p.23). The idea seems to be for library staff to provide and manage all the online access for licensed resources, as well as to collect and associate free content, including providing access to content that some people don't even want us collecting. When Salo suggests collecting materials from those who "will not sign licenses or handle deposits themselves" (Salo, 2008, p.23), it seems as though it would create another licensing nightmare down the road, similar to cases the Google Book Project is working through.

In my opinion, if you don't have the staffing to do it right in the first place then prioritize the management of existing paid licensed resources. Developing funding and institutional support will require the establishment of realistic cost expectations for creating and managing an institutional repository. Unfortunately, the newness of this field makes it especially difficult to measure how much it will cost to support open access resources. The volume of available free content is growing exponentially. Applications are continually developing to fill the needs. For example, accurate automated processes such as bringing catalog records into a cross-linking service are being aided by the development of the Open Archives Initiative (OAI). The volume of free content changes unpredictably.

Salo makes the point that there is a need for organizing the mass of content coming from university staff. The proactive and multi-directional publishing activities of academic staff, as Salo points out, are a problem for archiving and accessing content produced in the university setting. The work of gathering that strength into an organized process is a multi-departmental project that will likely involve mandating protocols for all authoring staff.

The E-Resources Management Handbook provides a broad overview of all the types of e-resources (databases, ejournals, ebooks, wiki/blog, websites) and discusses the great value of open access resources. In my opinion, the chapter "A general overview of the e-resource industry” is written with an open access bias, possibly exaggerating its progress and potential to help libraries by saving money. For example instead of mentioning the problems and real costs of integrating, supporting and managing these resources, it simply reports that the vice-chancellors will likely not look favorably at the costs, as though it is only the perspectives of the Vice-Chancellors that are the problem.

The chapter points out a valuable history note. The self- or open-archiving initiative, The Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), was developed by Stevan Harnad in the mid 1990s in response to an ongoing crisis in serials pricing which curtailed the number of journals that educational institutions could afford, thereby effectively robbing research of much scholarly communication.

Open access content uses a variety of funding models including: charging authors publication fees, receiving institutional subsidies via trusts, grants (Terry, 2005), membership fees or marketing schemes which may include pay-per-click ads on their website.

References:
Armstrong, Chris & Lonsdale, Ray. (2006). “A general overview of the e-resource industry.” The E-Resources Management Handbook. UKSG Publishing. http://uksg.metapress.com/openurl.asp?genre=article&id=doi:10.1629/9552448-0-3.1.1

Gregory, V. L. (2006). Selecting and managing electronic resources. Neal-Schuman Publishers, N.Y.

Russell, C. (2004). Complete Copyright: An Everyday Guide for Librarians. American Library Association.

Salo, D. (2008). “Innkeeper at the Roach Motel.” Library Trends, 57(2). (preprint: http://minds.wisconsin.edu/handle/1793/22088)

Terry, R. (2005). “Funding the Way to Open Access.” PLoS Biol 3(3): e97. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0030097

Introduction to Topic

Libraries have been engaged in online services to users for many years now. For example, Linking CD-ROMS to a LAN was being replaced by the web in the late 1990s (Ruth, 2000). Academic libraries in particular have been big spenders on e-resource subscriptions. Costs for these subscriptions rise yearly. The complexity of licensing and technology for limiting the use of the resources to paid subscribers also continues to increase. These are strong motivators for the development of the Open Access movement. Because the content and format are easily and constantly changing for these resources, it has become complicated to license, maintain accounts for and provide specialized access rights to these resources. Content providers have sometimes decided it is easier to provide the content for free and cover costs through various other means. In the context of science content this is more of an interest than in other academic fields where the costs of producing the material are less financed by taxes and academic institution.

The development of open access is obviously exciting, however it also presents more complexities to many already challenging problems. Creating and enforcing standard metadata and general operational standards across a huge publishing industry seems almost impossible, especially considering the excellent opportunities that have arisen for almost anyone to start publishing. Without metadata standards, gathering, organizing and cross-referencing content is filled with technological challenges. Without operational standards for online content, a wide variety of problems can occur. For example, once a print journal has been sent to you the content is very unlikely to change after you catalog and record access to it. However with a database a single Webmaster could make a decision to change something or unknowingly change something that was written into the licensing agreement. Such changes could render the catalog record inaccurate and create a situation where a library is no longer getting the access that was agreed upon in the license.

Often the location of the content changes URLs, causing users to link to a broken link or an automated message reporting that access is not available. It is difficult to measure how often a user receives the idea that we don't have paid access when in fact any one of many things has caused an accidental limitation of access. Online access to a single online journal can cost anywhere from few hundred to tens of thousands of dollars a year. This creates urgency around the development of tools that can accurately evaluate the number of successful accesses. A standard system for tracking usage statistics (i.e., Counter reports) is still be developed and applied. For example a specific Counter report method for counting eBook usage was only recently developed and released in 2006.

Usage statistics are helpful in managing the cost of maintaining and supporting access to those resources. Because access issues of licensed resources do not appear to be going away any time soon it is a real commitment for libraries to also support access issues for free resources. As the availability and volume of open access content develops, libraries have to make decisions about how to best allocate their time and energy in presenting resources to the users.

Reference:
Miller, Ruth H. (2000). "Electronic Resources and Academic Libraries, 1980-2000: A Historical Perspective." Library Trends, 48(4), 645-670.

Who the L.R.U.?

Hello, I am the author of this blog, Have License Will Query and I recently started working in an academic Licensed Resource Unit (L.R.U.). Welcome.

This blog is for the fulfillment of a class which fortunately for me has everything to do with my job. While I find the field of online resources to be extremely exciting and literally on the cutting edge of an information access revolution, I want to be clear that while I am writing this I am new to the field. I have been studying and working in online resources for a matter of months, not years. I encourage anyone reading it to consider the possibility that some content of the blog is partially if not wholly incorrect. So while I will be discussing readings from peer-reviewed journals, it will be from a limited perspective to the greater context in which the statements were made and the research conducted. In the process of learning, I am using this blog as a tool and I invite you to read along and join me in this journey.

More specifically, the purpose of the Have License Will Query blog is to record my research of peer-reviewed open access and licensed resource issues with reference to serials and databases in academic library settings. The mission will be to describe phenomenon within this field of information resources, explain its history, meanings, current circumstances and consequences. It will be organized sequentially by the following entry topics:

literature review and methodology

data analysis

discussion and conclusion

The blog will focus on various aspects of peer-reviewed open access, licensed resources, and repositories by exploring questions and comparing and contrasting viewpoints. The information resources will come from academic sources of information, academic research articles, trade press articles, interviews, conference reports and reflections on my own experiences as a user and academic library staff member. Expect all the content described to be posted weekly between June 16, 2009 to the end of July, 2009.

Please enjoy the blog and know that all comments are welcome and dialog is encouraged.

Please see the license (linked below) for this blog. This license was created using Creative Commons license generator (http://creativecommons.org/license/).

Have License Will Query blog by Elizabeth is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.