...The report on Scholarly Communication (SC) Education Initiatives shows that increasing numbers of US libraries are employing a SC librarian, and that the topics on which they educate faculty and promote to their library users have changed; where fair use and copyright once predominated, the emphasis is now on author rights, institutional repositories, and scholarly publishing economics (with particular reference to open access (OA) publishing).
The survey on OA reports that the majority of US academic libraries are now incorporating OA literature (journals, government reports, etc.) into their OPACs (online public access catalogues, and their linked websites, and undertake to promote these with their other (purchased) resources. The majority of libraries also report that their budgets subsidize OA journal author fees – mostly through ‘subscriptions’ to BioMed- Central and PLoS....
The surveys only report on about 70 of ARL’s member libraries [in 2007] (the surveys were sent to 123 libraries in total), so they may not be entirely representative of all institutions – but they do capture findings from many of the important academic libraries in the US....
PS: For more details, including excerpts from the two SPEC Kits, see our blog post on Kit 299 and our post on Kit 300.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/04/2008 11:50:00 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.
