The high inflation rate for library journal subscriptions continues with projections for next year at 7-9%. One of the options for reducing the impact of journal inflation on Library and University budgets is to promote publication in the growing number of open access (OA) journals.
“In its second year of publication, Public Library of Science (PLoS) Biology had an impact factor of 13.9, making it the highest ranked general biology journal in the world, and five OA journals from BioMed Central ranked in the top five journals in their specialties. These successes are backed by research showing that OA articles generate between 25% and 250% more citations than non-OA articles in the same journal from the same year” (Library Journal, April 15, 2006).
Previous efforts by the Library to support open access:
membership in SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) an organization started by the largest research libraries (ARL) to develop and promote alternatives to high priced commercial journals including open access journals and repositories. We were a founding member.
UNH joined the Alliance for Taxpayer Access (ATA), an active program of governmental, media, and public relations devoted to supporting the proposal by the NIH and the U.S. Congress to have taxpayer-funded biomedical research freely accessible in PubMed Central.
adding records for open access titles from the Directory of Open Access Journals (2200 titles) to the Library’s online catalog.
membership in the group of libraries supporting the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy online reference work ($3000 over 3 years).
...By joining we could also encourage our faculty to participate in Open Access publication.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/30/2006 10:29:00 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.
