Elaine Nowick and Claudine Arnold Jenda, Libraries Stuck in the Middle: Reactive vs. Proactive Responses to the Science Journal Crisis, Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship 39 (Winter 2004). Nowick and Jenda summarize library responses to the crisis in scholarly publishing costs and cite what they deem most useful approaches. They point how unsustainable costs limit scientists' access to each other's work. The authors praise recent library cancellations of expensive journals but are less enthusiastic about consortium purchases, saying they "are just another way of delaying the inevitable time when commercial publishers will again out-price the collective budgets and buying power of consortia as a whole." Laudable publishing models include library and scholar partnerships such as the Journal of Insect Science; low-cost alternatives either initiated by scholarly societies alone or in cooperation with SPARC; and open-access initiatives such as PLoS and BioMed Central. Library and scholar educational efforts, such as informing scholars about copyright alternatives and principles outlined in, for example, SPARC's Create Change, are highly touted. Nevertheless, the authors call for changes in the tenure and promotion system and a general change in librarian and scholar attitudes towards the publishing system from passive roles to active ones. (Source: The (sci-tech) Library Question)
Posted by
Garrett at 3/11/2004 06:13:00 PM.
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.
