10th entry
Discuss on the Impact of Open Access Initiatives to Libraries.
The first scholarly journals began in 1665 for the publishing of research works among the scientific community to disseminate new findings and knowledge quickly and to establish priority of researchers investigating the same problem. Authors of these journal articles were not paid but they wrote more for the sharing of their work and impact and not for payment. This tradition of writing for impact and recognition among professional circles instead of financial reward has continued until today (Albert 2006; Suber 2004).
The escalating price of print journals in the 1980s made subscriptions unaffordable for many university libraries, causing cancellation of some journals, thus being deprived of access to ongoing scholarly research findings. The “serials crisis”, a term that is used to describe the price increase of many scholarly journals is also seen as a problem caused by some commercial publishers, specifically in the area of science, technology and medicine. The rising rate of journals affected library budget and was considered a problem that libraries (especially university libraries) need to overcome (Panitch and Michalak 2005).
The serials crisis was a factor for the development of the OA (open access) movement. Paul Ginsparg, a physicist, was the first person to make physics preprints accessible on the internet when he set up the server ArXiv at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1991, freely sharing information before publication (Albert 2006; OA). Three years later, another leading activist and co-founder of the movement was Stephen Harnad, a cognitive scientist, who advocated self-archiving and the creation of tools for interoperability and metadata standards so that different multiple archives can function as one that allows free searchable access (Albert 2006). The OA movement opens up alternatives for research works to be disseminated worldwide instantly. University libraries and librarians now have a solution to the serials crisis and are faced with new challenges of managing open access articles/journals. According to Suber (2004), open access literature is “digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions”.
Research articles through open access can be published in two ways, mainly:
- OA journals (also known as gold OA)
- OA archives or repositories (known as green OA)
The difference between the two is that OA journals are peer reviewed while OA repositories are not. OA archives are where authors deposit their own work into the institution’s repository at their own convenient time. The colour gold and green designated is to differentiate their venues (Suber 2004).
One example of a gold OA from the University Malaya library website would be the Electronic Journal of University Malaya (EJUM) while MyAIS (Malaysian Abstracting and Indexing System), an institutional repository, which is a product of a research project undertaken by the Faculty of Computer Science & Information Technology, University Malaya (Kiran K. and Chia 2009), is available via University Malaya Library website open access databases, is a green OA. EJUM is an electronic journal publishing system developed by the Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, University Malaya to host Malaysian journals, and not for University Malaya’s journal output alone. Publication and uploading of articles into the system are done by a group of academic volunteers (Zainab A.N. and Nor Badrul Anuar 2008).
Open Access in
Open access initiatives (institutional repositories) in Malaysia
Zainab A.N. and Nor Badrul Anuar (2008) noted that in Malaysia
From a research carried out by Abrizah (2009) in a research intensive university, she found that one third of the faculty respondents were unaware of open access and IR or aware but uninvolved. Other deterrent from using IR by faculty members were copyright issues and plagiarism. One other reason for the low use of the IR was the relatively new establishment of the IR, thus low awareness among faculty members (Abrizah 2009).
Impact on Libraries and Librarians
The concept of open access publishing offers the library a new avenue of managing and developing journal collections. The willingness of university libraries to establish institutional repositories indicates their active role in remaining relevant to the ever-evolving landscape of information and communication technologies that impact libraries. Libraries’ traditional role of managing and archiving print journal collections will experience a paradigm shift as they subscribe to and support the faculty’s open access publishing activities. Libraries will not be sidelined but will play an important role in providing the expertise of collecting, organizing and maintaining digital content contributed by authors. Libraries’ help and support to the authors is in the aspect of document format, metadata standards, and authority control. Libraries will have to work closely with the faculty, who are the contributors, users and change agents for the working success of the institutional repositories (Crow 2002, 20-21).
The impact of open access publishing/institutional repositories extends beyond the internal community of the university in its positive influence as the information resource centre and provider to the national and international scholarly community. Open access articles have a higher chance of being read and cited than the closed access articles, which are not freely accessible on the Internet. This increases the visibility of both the authors and the university. The impact of the research works, which are now accessible around the world, will influence future research and contribute to the advancement of research, education and society as a whole. Both visibility and impact will greatly elevate the reputation of both the authors and the university. On a negative note, there are some concerns about OA, such as long-term findability, storage and authenticity of the digital documents. Electronic/digital documents have a knack for disappearing from the web. But steps are taken to overcome these problems by ensuring searchable metadata and persistent identifiers, and digital signature for authenticity (Open access to scholarly information).
As for librarians, their role in giving user education would be expanded to include helping the faculty learn how to use the IR software for self-archiving. The librarians themselves must be thoroughly knowledgeable of the IR software (Allard, Mack and Feltner-Reichert 2005) and have a working knowledge of the software. The librarians who will be involved in training the IR users should also receive training first about the reasons and benefits of establishing the IR so as to be able to speak confidently and be competent in providing training to the faculty. One effective way is for librarians to have a hands-on training in using the IR (Bell
Librarians can also help explain and promote IR on paper to be distributed to faculty that advocates scholarly publishing through open access, the current trend to be reckoned with in making research works visible quickly, locally and internationally, thus creating impact on the learning community.
Librarians may also use their public relations skill in communicating directly the availability and benefits of IR to the faculty. Public relations and communications are skills that can be acquired through training for the librarians, thereby better equipping librarians for the task. Planned public relations strategy should be the responsibility of the librarians in this awareness effort to reach the faculty (Open access for scholarly information). Abrizah (2009), from her research found that faculty was willing to use IR when made aware of the availability and benefits of using IR.
Librarians’ role in collection development is also expanded here to include drafting clear guidelines and procedures to help authors deposit intellectual output that are consistent with the IR contents as intended by the library (Allard, Mack and Feltner-Reichert 2005).
In conclusion, libraries and librarians are faced with the challenges of the advance of information and communication technology and the open access movement and must take steps to continually embrace the improvements that these technologies can bring to libraries and their patrons. Librarians’ role are not just custodian of the library but with the OA movement that advocates open access scholarly publishing, whether through journals or institutional repositories, their role will be expanded to include being that of stewards of the digital collections. The impact of open access on librarians that entails new responsibilities will serve to elevate the field of librarianship.
References:
Abrizah, A. 2009. The cautious faculty: their awareness and attitudes towards
institutional repositories. Malaysian Journal of Library & Information Science 14,
no. 2: 17-37.
Albert, Karen M. 2006. Open access: implications for scholarly publishing and medical
libraries. Journal of the Medical Library Association 94, no. 3 (July),
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1525322/pdf/i1536-5050-094-03-0253.pdf (accessed April 9, 2011)
Allard, Suzie, Thura R. Mack and Melanie Feltner-Reichert. 2005. The librarian’s role in
institutional repositories. Reference Service Review 33, no. 3: 325-336.
success of institutional repositories. Reference Service Review 33, no. 3: 283-290.
Crow, Raym. 2002. The case for institutional repositories: A SPARC position paper.
ARL Bimonthly Report 223. http://works.bepress.com/ir_research/7 (accessed
April 11, 2011).
Kiran K. and Chia Yip Ping. 2009. Open access initiatives in academic libraries:
Challenge to the user. World Library and Information Congress: 75th IFLA
general conference and council, August 23-27, Milan , Italy
OA, open access to scholarly information.
(accessed April 10, 2011).
Panitch, Judith M. and Sarah Michalak. 2005. The serials crisis. A white paper for the
UNC-Chapel Hill scholarly communications convocations, January.
April 10, 2011).
Suber, Peter. 2004. Open access overview.
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm (accessed April 10, 2011).
Zainab A.N. and Nor Badrul Anuar. 2008. Visibility and Malaysian Scholarly Journals.
Workshop on managing scholarly journals, January 13-16, Langkawi , Malaysia
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