Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Monday, November 10, 2008

What digital resources do faculty find most useful?

Nancy L. Maron and K. Kirby Smith, Current Models of Digital Scholarly Communication, ARL, November 2008.  Excerpt:

...Faculty frequently told librarians that speedy access to new work, the open access model, and the benefits of being part of a network or online community of scholars made the e-only journals they suggested innovative....

Concerns persist in the academy that publication in e-only journals will be perceived as less prestigious than publishing in print. Will the work be cited in the best journals? Will it be considered a legitimate publication by a tenure review board? Misperceptions about the level of peer review of open access publications have contributed to these concerns, although leaders of the open access movement have continued to argue that quality and cost are not synonymous, and that notions of access and prestige can be separated....

Most of the e-only journals that emerged through our study use an open access model. In fact, the few examples of subscription-based support were for e-only journals published by commercial publishers or scholarly societies; the independent titles tended to be open access....

Achieving sustainability – especially for those resources with an open access mandate – is a universal challenge.  Small, low-cost options like blogs aside, the challenge for digital scholarly resources – open access or not – is how to generate the funds needed to support themselves over the long term. For the open access publications that comprise the majority of the resources we studied here, traditional subscription- based support is not an option, so finding an economic model to support their work requires experimentation. While resources in our sample employ a wide range of revenue models, including advertising, author fees, and corporate sponsorship, most appear to enjoy some degree of support from their host institution, including in-kind contributions of server space and/or technical support. The contributions of volunteers are also important to many of the examples we saw. The speed of digital communication has made it possible to harness the power of volunteer scholarly contributors from around the world....

Also see the ARL's searchable, OA collection of the examples gathered during the study. 

The ARL released two announcements, both dated today (1, 2).  From the first of these:

In the spring of 2008, ARL engaged Ithaka's Strategic Services Group to conduct an investigation into the range of online resources valued by scholars, paying special attention to those projects that are pushing beyond the boundaries of traditional formats and are considered innovative by the faculty who use them. The networked digital environment has enabled the creation of many new kinds of works, and many of these resources have become essential tools for scholars conducting research, building scholarly networks, and disseminating their ideas and work, but the decentralized distribution of these new-model works has made it difficult to fully appreciate their scope and number.

Ithaka's findings are based on a collection of resources identified by a volunteer field team of over 300 librarians at 46 academic institutions in the US and Canada. Field librarians talked with faculty members on their campuses about the digital scholarly resources they find most useful and reported the works they identified. The authors evaluated each resource gathered by the field team and conducted interviews of project leaders of 11 representative resources. Ultimately, 206 unique digital resources spanning eight formats were identified that met the study's criteria....