1. GS: What can librarians do to get involved in OA? What are the benefits?
Lindsay: "Try to develop OA information pages at your library to improve general awareness of OA issues; increase the awareness of OA and competence among teaching staff, increase researcher knowledge about OA issues and increase amount of records in local and national repositories."
Denise: "Show your solidarity with OA by featuring various open access journals on your library websites; do displays; have handouts ready; do presentations to the public, etc." (For more information, see Denise's powerpoint presentation.)
Lorie: "Deposit any papers you have done for conferences into E-LIS so that other librarians can access the professional literature."
Denise offered these perspectives, also:
"Open access is a choice as to how you communicate with your peers. Why choose to limit communication when it is easy to make communication open? At EBLIP we are trying to bridge the gap between research and practice - if we do not make the content widely available to all, then we are not going to achieve that goal.
"The second is the librarian's role in supporting faculty/researchers and new methods of scholarly communication. This is an important role for librarians. Taking a leadership role to inform and support faculty re: open access enables us to be part of a changing system. For me this is simply about moving towards more equitable access to scholarly information."
"A good example for me has been the Canadian Journal of Sociology whose editor is at U of A. Over the past year or so Pam Ryan, Leah Vanderjagt and I worked with this editor to move his journal from a traditional print subscription model to an OA one. Without having the credibility of being editors ourselves and knowing the system/what was needed to make things work, it would have been much more difficult to facilitate the process. See Kevin's article about his process of moving to OA." ...
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/28/2008 09:58:00 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.
