Tag: D-Lib Magazine

recent articles read

I’ve been catching up on some professional reading.

I’ve read a few articles recently that I’ve found quite interesting and would like to share some thoughts on them.

Van de Sompel, Herbert, et. al. “Rethinking Scholarly Communication: Building the System that Scholars Deserve.” D-Lib Magazine. 10:9 (2004), doi:10.1045/september2004-vandesompel [open access]

I was immediately intrigued by what the creator of OpenURL (and his co-authors) might suggest as a technological solution to the current problems with scholarly communication. I couldn’t follow all of the technological details (they lost me at the flow charts and diagrams), but I was pleased to read this in the conclusion: “The NSF has recently recommended funding the authors of this paper to investigate these problems, building on our collective research and development. In a future article we will discuss our current work in moving toward a network overlay that promotes interoperability among heterogeneous data models and system implementations. We will describe our architectural vision for addressing the fundamental technical requirements of a next generation system for scholarly communication.”

Antelman, Kristin. “Do Open-Access Articles Have a Greater Research Impact?.” College & Research Libraries. 65:5, 372-382. [open access]

The author set out to find data to confirm or debunk the common assumption that open access articles have a greater research impact than those which are not open access. She looks at four disciplines in different stages of open access development, and all of them have had a history with the use of pre-print articles. The data she gathers leads her to conclude that open access articles do have a greater research impact than those which are not freely available. I would like to see these types of studies extended to other disciplines, but I am pleased to see that someone out there is gathering data for the rest of us to share with the teaching/research faculty in the discussions about scholarly communication we should all be having.

Siebenberg, Tammy R., Betty Galbraith, and Eileen E. Brady. “Print versus Electronic Journal Use in Three Sci/Tech Disciplines: What

open access publications in library science

More thoughts, links, and general blabbing on open access publishing.

On the LIBLICENSE-L, Rick Anderson recently brought up the question of whether or not the American Libraries Association (ALA) has considered going to an open access publishing model for it’s publications. It seems that the Medical Library Association has one open access journal, although it isn’t listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) at this time and is only available through PubMedCentral. Oddly enough, they do have subscription rates. The Science and Technology Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) (a part of ALA) has made their Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship quarterly available online through an open access model.

As I mentioned yesterday, my dean asked me to put together some information about open access for the other librarians here and to come up with ways that we could be involved with the open access movement. I’ve been surfing around the web and in databases this afternoon, looking for articles and other information that can help me distill this nebulous thing down to something I and my colleagues can digest. I was surprised by how many titles were listed on the DOAJ page for library and information science. There is only one that I recognize imediately as being reputable, and that is D-Lib Magazine. Also, like any list of journals, there are likely to be title changes and publications that have ceased.

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