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Abstract
Students and scholars can take full advantage of Open Access journals only if libraries make them available through mechanisms that are familiar to patrons. This study examines the extent to which American liberal arts colleges have provided access to Open Access journals through their journal title lists (Serials Solutions, Ex Libris, etc.) and their online public access catalogs (OPACs). While 57 percent of the colleges provide access to at least 90 percent of the journals in our sample, 20 percent of the colleges provide access to fewer than 20 percent of the journals. Large and high-impact journals are especially likely to appear in libraries' catalogs and journal lists. There is no systematic trend by publication fee status or country of publication, however. The study concludes with a discussion of the strategies libraries can use to select Open Access journals and add them to their collections.
Notes
1. This estimate is based on an average price of $634.06 for titles held by American college and university libraries in 2008. See EBSCO Information Services, “Five Year Journal Price Increase History (2004–2008),” http://www2.ebsco.com/en-us/Documents/customer/OVERVIEW-2008.pdf (accessed 29 Sep 2009). Of course the journals listed in DOAJ do not necessarily meet the selection criteria in place at American colleges and universities.
2. Krista D. Schmidt, Pongracz Sennyey, and Timothy V. Carstens, “New Roles for a Changing Environment: Implications of Open Access for Libraries,” College & Research Libraries 66, no. 5 (September 2005): 407–416; Anna Hood and Mykie Howard, “Adding Value to the Catalog in an Open Access World,” The Serials Librarian 50, no. 3–4 (May 2006): 249–252; Péter Jacsó, “Open J-Gate, DOAJ, The Serials Directory,” Online 31, no. 6 (November/December 2007): 53–56.
3. This principle is well-established in the library literature. See, for example, William H. Walters, Samuel G. Demas, Linda Stewart, and Jennifer Weintraub, “Guidelines for Collecting Aggregations of Web Resources,” Information Technology and Libraries 17, no. 3 (September 1998): 157–160.
4. Walt Crawford, “Is Free Too Expensive? Open Access and Libraries,” in Charleston Conference Proceedings 2004, ed. Rosann Bazirjian, Vicky H. Speck, and Beth R. Bernhardt (Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2006): 80.
5. Krista D. Schmidt and Nancy Newsome, “The Changing Landscape of Serials: Open Access Journals in the Public Catalog,” The Serials Librarian 52, no. 1–2 (June 2007): 119–133.
6. Crawford, “Is Free Too Expensive?”
7. Crawford, “Is Free Too Expensive?”, 86.
8. Crawford, “Is Free Too Expensive?”
9. Kristi L. Palmer, Emily Dill, and Charlene Christie, “Where There's a Will There's a Way?: Survey of Academic Librarian Attitudes about Open Access,” College & Research Libraries 70, no. 4 (July 2009): 315–335.
10. Anna K. Hood, Open Access Resources, SPEC Kit 300 (Washington, DC: Association of Research Libraries, 2007).
11. Four alternatives to the DOAJ journal list were considered but not chosen for use in this study. Open J-Gate (http://www.openj-gate.com) lists nearly six thousand OA journals, but only 57 percent of them are peer reviewed. Open J-Gate also includes quite a few journals that provide free access to just one or two articles from each issue (Jacsó, “Open J-Gate, DOAJ, The Serials Directory”). Ulrich's Periodicals Directory and EBSCONET identify OA journals, but both include non-academic titles, embargoed journals, and journals that make only some of their content freely available. The Open Science Directory (http://www.opensciencedirectory.net) covers all the OA journals found within sixty-two other databases, including DOAJ and Open J-Gate. Consequently, it lists quite a few journals that are not truly Open Access.
12. English-language journals were identified through an inspection of recent issues, since the language information found in DOAJ was not entirely accurate. We included all journals that had published some English-language material (other than abstracts) during the most recent twelve months of publication.
13. This finding is consistent with earlier evidence. See Jutta Haider, “The Geographic Distribution of Open Access Journals,” poster presented at the Ninth World Congress on Health Information and Libraries, Salvador de Bahia, Brazil, September 21–23, 2005, http://www.soi.city.ac.uk/~ch696/icml9_poster_haider.pdf (accessed 29 Sep 2009); Mamiko Matsubayashi, Keiko Kurata, Yukiko Sakai, Tomoko Morioka, Shinya Kato, Shinji Mine, and Shuichi Ueda, “Status of Open Access in the Biomedical Field in 2005,” Journal of the Medical Library Association 97, no. 1 (January 2009): 4–11.
14. A 2005 study reported that a substantially higher percentage of DOAJ journals—47 percent—levied publication fees. That study did not present results for Open Access articles. See Kaufman-Wills Group, The Facts About Open Access (Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, 2005), http://www.alpsp.org/ngen_public/article.asp?id=200&did=47&aid=270&st=&oaid=-1 (accessed 29 Sep 2009).
15. Similar results were reported in an earlier study, William H. Walters and Esther Isabelle Wilder, “The Cost Implications of Open-access Publishing in the Life Sciences,“ BioScience 57, no. 7 (July/August 2007): 619–625.
16. Thomson Reuters, “The Thomson Reuters Journal Selection Process,” http://thomsonreuters.com/products_services/science/free/essays/journal_selection_process (accessed 29 Sep 2009).
17. Heather G. Morrison, “The Dramatic Growth of Open Access: Implications and Opportunities for Resource Sharing,” Journal of Interlibrary Loan, Document Delivery & Electronic Reserve 16, no. 3 (August 2006): 95–107.
18. Jill E. Grogg, “Linking Users to Open Access,” Searcher 13, no. 4 (April 2005): 52–56.
19. Christine Fischer, “Group Therapy—Managing OA Journals,” Against the Grain 19, no. 5 (November 2007): 76–77.
20. Schmidt and Newsome, “The Changing Landscape of Serials.”
21. Commercial journal databases had begun to include OA journals as early as 2004. See Morrison, “The Dramatic Growth of Open Access.”
22. A similar method was used at the Colorado School of Mines, where a locally developed title list and journal management system could not make use of vendor-supplied lists of OA journals. See Heather L. Whitehead and Lisa G. Dunn, “Enriching GoldRush with Core Subject Open Access Journals: Motives and Methods,” in Charleston Conference Proceedings 2006, ed. Beth R. Bernhardt, Tim Daniels, and Kim Steinle (Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2007): 55–59.
23. Crawford, “Is Free Too Expensive?”; Hood and Howard, “Adding Value to the Catalog.”
24. Fischer, “Group Therapy.”
25. Hood, Open Access Resources.
26. Fischer, “Group Therapy”; Schmidt and Newsome, “The Changing Landscape of Serials.”
27. Bradley A. Long, “OPACs and e-Journals: Issues to Consider,” Journal of Electronic Resources in Medical Libraries 3, no. 3 (August 2006): 89–95.
28. University of California, “Open Access Resources at the UC Libraries: Policies and Procedures for Shared Cataloging, Linking, and Management,” http://www.cdlib.org/inside/collect/openaccess.html (accessed 29 Sep 2009); also included in Hood, Open Access Resources, 104–106.
29. Robin Peek, “Counting OA Journals,” Information Today 22, no. 11 (December 2005): 17–18.
30. Philip M. Davis, “Open Access Publisher Accepts Nonsense Manuscript for Dollars,” The Scholarly Kitchen, 10 June 2009. http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2009/06/10/nonsense-for-dollars (accessed 29 Sep 2009).
31. “Manuscript re-submission preparation” is one of the optional services listed at the publisher's web site. “Your manuscript and peer review report will be sent to our business partner, who will prepare a revised manuscript and response to peer reviewers' recommendations. The preparedfiles will be sent to you for sign-off prior to re-submission. Our staff with coordinate communication all communications [sic] and monitor progress.” See Libertas Academica, “Optional Services for Authors,” http://www.la-press.com/help_for_authors.php#optionalservices (accessed 29 Sep 2009).
32. “Resubmitted manuscripts are not sent to peer reviewers. Evaluation of resubmitted manuscripts is undertaken by Editors in Chief or Associate Editors only.” See Libertas Academica, “Fairness in Peer Review,” http://www.la-press.com/help_for_authors.php#fairpeerreview(accessed 29 Sep 2009).
33. Internet Scientific Publications, “Internet Journal of Genomics and Proteomics,” http://www.ispub.com/journal/the_internet_journal_of_genomics_and_proteomics.html (accessed 29 Sep 2009).
34. The BioScience Writers website does not make it clear whether their services are strictly editorial. “All of our editors have made science a primary focus in their lives and their experience reflects this focus. This places them in an ideal position to help focus and polish the science of your paper.” See BioScience Writers, “Scientific Editing and Proofreading Services,” http://www.bsw-llc.com/ispub/Default.htm (accessed 29 Sep 2009).