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.