Today I went to a CLA workshop called Transitioning to Open Access on how librarians can engage in the practice of open access (OA). There were three presenters, Heather Joseph of SPARC, Kathleen Shearer of CARL, and Heather Morrison of the CLA. The presentations will be available on E-LIS later today.
Heather J.'s presentation was a overview of the state of OA, and a reminder of some of the major challenges faced by librarians and library systems that are involved in the support of OA projects, be they journals or repositories. She also highlighted the issue of author rights and talked on how to advocate policy support for OA initiatives. Her take away was that librarians can educate colleagues and administrators on OA realities, and can encourage the initiation of OA projects and OA-friendly policies. Toward these goals, she highlighted the DOAJ as a promotional tool, and announced the Canadian version of SPARC's author's addendum. In addition she recommended ROMEO database, and invited us to look forward to a SPARC database of publishers' current copyright practices. Kathleen Shearer of CARL started out by noting that decision makers at Canadian universities have recognized the "unsustainability" of current publishing business models, under which research information is paid for three times (by the granting body, by the underpaid editorial work of professors, and by libraries who purchase journals). As evidence, she cited John Lorinc's The Bottom Line on Open Access. She then outlined CARL's history as a promoter and tester of OA projects with its Institutional Repository Program (almost all major Canadian research libraries now host repositories), and identified the next step as finding ways to populate these resources. CARL is now producing an "IR Advocacy Toolkit" (available in the spring), it initiating a discipline-specific Repository Pilot, is enriching its CARLCORE Metadata standard, and is developing tools to support the production of repository usage statistics.
Heather M's presentation focussed on the CLA's history with OA, and it was very instructive. The CLA endorsed OA principles in 2002, and has since moved to sign both the major international OA declarations, and has taken steps to make all their materials available in OA-compatible ways. To paraphrase her "We decided that our members do not join primarily for the benefit of getting a print publication delivered to their home, just in case they are caught out with nothing to read." One of the major benefits, she said, of all this policy work at the CLA has been to make it much easier to respond when called upon to make contributions to public debates. As we heard several times in this workshop, publishers have sophisticated means to make their views known to government, and government has repeatedly called for input from other interest groups....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/12/2007 11:31:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
