Open Access and its Practical Impact on the Work of Academic Librarians. Collection Development, Public Services, and the Library and Information Science Literature

241 Pages·2010·1.01 MB·English

by  Laura Bowering Mullen (Auth.)

Open Access and its Practical Impact
on the Work of Academic Librarians
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Open Access and its
Practical Impact on the
Work of Academic Librarians
Collection development, public
services, and the library and
information science literature
L B M
AURA OWERING ULLEN
Chandos Publishing
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First published in 2010
ISBN:
978 1 84334 593 0
© L.B.Mullen,2010
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About the author
Laura Bowering Mullen is the Behavioral Sciences Librarian at the
Library of Science and Medicine of Rutgers, The State University of New
Jersey. She has had many years of experience as an academic science
reference librarian, and is involved in collection development, faculty
liaison and public services capacities. Mullen has co-authored recent
articles on topics such as Google Scholar’s integration into the academic
library, the continued relevance of ‘core lists’ for collection development,
and librarians’ roles in assisting faculty with increasing research impact.
She is presently Chair of the Association of College and Research
Libraries’ Education and Behavioral Sciences Section (EBSS) Psychology
Committee and the ACRL EBSS Scholarly Communication Committee,
as well as a member of the American Psychological Association’s Library
Advisory Council.
The author may be contacted at:
Laura Bowering Mullen
Library of Science and Medicine
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
165 Bevier Road
Piscataway
NJ 08854-8009
USA
E-mail: [email protected]
ix
Preface
As an academic librarian working on the front-lines of reference, collection
development, liaison work and instruction for many years, I have seen
firsthand the rapid transformation of almost every aspect of academic
libraries. The idea for this book was generated out of a genuine curiosity
about the open access movement as it relates to the everyday work of
academic librarians. There has been so much discussion that seemingly
permeates the library discourse, but in reality, after ten years of advocacy
by many library-related groups, one has to wonder why daily academic
library work has not been transformed to any great extent. Scholarly
communication paradigms are changing, publishers and libraries have
moved to digital environments, but budgets are straining more than ever
under the continuous cost of doing business, especially due to the serials
pricing models that open access was supposed to transform.
The open access conversations taking place in the library and publishing
worlds seem almost peripheral to the daily work of academic librarians.
Collection development, reference, instruction and librarian scholarship
seem to proceed as before. Rather than changing practices, the open access
movement may actually be an add-on to the work of academic librarians.
Any future vision for open access would want to take into account the
need for not only discussion, but transformation of actual work practices.
This would allow the changes needed for the positive results of the open
access movement to come to fruition, and to percolate through more layers
of the library. The need for change and the tools to make it happen would
finally reach the librarians on the front-lines of reference and instruction,
and those who build the collections to support that work. In many cases,
open access has not had much effect on many of those working in
academic libraries. Open access may not change the library to the extent
that was originally expected.
The impetus for change to open access may come from university or
college leadership at the provost level where changes to tenure and
promotion scholarship guidelines may be manifest, or from the library
administration level in response to issues related to serials pricing models
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Open Access and its Practical Impact on the Work of Academic Librarians
and dwindling budgets. It does then follow that librarians must carry out
the actual work of decision-making and changing practices that is required
in any move away from traditional behaviour. Librarians will make
decisions on whether to move open access alternatives into daily reference,
collections or instruction work. Librarians have a great deal of influence
because they are on the front-lines, assisting faculty and graduate students
with library research, and also affecting to some degree the information
practices and competencies of undergraduates and even the public they
serve. While most librarians’ rhetoric is one of support for open access, it
is not yet clear how extensively the practical aspects of open access have
made a difference in library positions, hiring, workload, or the user
experience in academic libraries. Little research has been done on how
librarians are actually promoting the open access movement in their daily
work with library users and faculty groups, or on actual librarian attitudes
toward the promised changes offered by the open access movement.
This book is written for librarians, and students of library and
information science (LIS), and all of those interested in how open access
in all of its iterations may actually be affecting academic library practices,
or how it is not. Are librarians convinced strong advocacy for the open
access movement will create the library collections and services that the
researchers say they want and need? Do librarians actually see changes to
the library as a result of open access? It is a transformative time, but so
much of the action is in the hands of librarians in the collective sense.
With thousands of articles written on the subject of open access and
scholarly communication issues, and a whole world of new publishing
paradigms, it may truly be time to examine the relationships that
librarians have with the scholarly information that is being produced and
disseminated in new ways all over the web. This book will not attempt to
regurgitate all of the information about open access or scholarly
communication already available, but instead aims to provoke thought
and discussion about how academic library work might begin to
incorporate new paradigms of collections, services and librarian
publishing behaviours. The aspects of open access that directly affect not
only the work of librarians but also issues relevant to the LIS literature
will be covered. The treatment in this volume is mainly of a general,
informative nature, and not written for those who are already scholarly
communication or open access experts. It is important to write for
mainstream library audiences, and not keep the conversation at a level
that is ‘preaching to the choir’. Mainly, at this juncture, it may be time for
academic librarians to decide to integrate open access much more fully
into daily workflows and public services efforts, or risk seeing a
xii
Preface
transformative vision become just that; an idea not easily translated into
practical action in the workplace, especially in difficult economic times
for libraries. These days, more than ever, libraries need the relief promised
by the open access movement as they grapple with difficulties of paying
bills to publishers and struggle with changes at every turn. It may be time
for a real discussion among librarians, with a goal of assessing their
attitudes and work practices toward open access advocacy and what it
could mean for individual academic libraries. This volume is an attempt
to provide information to librarians seeking an update on how their
profession is responding to open access in the practical sense. It is meant
to inform out of a concern of a possible disconnect between rhetoric and
actual practice, not to provide further advocacy or plans for activism.
The issues discussed in this book will revolve mainly around new forms
of scholarship as they relate to the scholarly journal article literature,
especially the issues of self-archiving and open access journals. Librarians
who write for publication in the LIS literature would be assumed to be
seeking out open access journals as outlets for their work as well as self-
archiving their work in the repositories that exist to pull together the
global literature of librarianship. It would be assumed that academic
librarians and faculty teaching in library school programmes would be
early adopters of self-archiving behaviour as members of the field most
committed to open access as an agent of change. It is not enough for
librarians and their organisations to proclaim open access as a societal
value, as well as a very important library imperative without doing the
hard work to make it happen in the library. It is time for all librarians to
be part of the open access discussion one way or another, and reaffirm the
value of librarians’ work, traditional or transformative, as an integral part
of the scholarly communication landscape at every institution.
xiii
1
Introduction
Open access in the library: implications
for academic librarians
It has been stated that librarians ‘embrace’ open access. Vocal activism by
librarians has even been credited with fuelling the earliest conversations
about open access in response to changes in the formal scholarly
communication systems in place for most disciplines, including library and
information science (LIS). The assumption is that librarians are staunch
advocates of all open access initiatives. Open access seems to have become
a basic tenet of librarianship in recent years. With academic librarianship
changing at lightning speed due to the constant demands of a digital world,
one wonders whether librarians working in academic libraries are
responding to continued open access advocacy, or whether it has instead
developed as somewhat of a ‘parallel universe’. Librarians may indeed
wonder how they can and should be responding to repeated calls for
action. Librarians working in public services in instruction and reference
roles, as well as those in collection development may be affected, but there
has been little research to date examining how academic librarians have
responded to the open access movement in their daily work, or in their
own writing for the LIS literature. As readers, editors, reviewers or
publishers, librarians would seem to want to effect change within their
own literature first. Following a now established outcry, one would assume
the LIS journal literature would be the first to show a transition to open
access models and other new forms of scholarship. It seems librarians have
signed on to an open access agenda, and that the agenda should drive
changes in reference, collections and the LIS literature. The movement
toward integrating free scholarly material and products has certainly
affected the technical services areas in many ways, most prominently in the
development of institutional repositories. It would seem to follow that
librarians would be the first responders to the call to populate the
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Open Access and its Practical Impact on the Work of Academic Librarians
institutional repository, even as they exhort their teaching faculty
colleagues to self-archive all scholarly work. Librarians in their various
roles as writers, researchers, collection development specialists,
administrators, or while working on the front-lines of reference and
instruction surely must be concerned about how the open access
movement, now somewhat mature, has been affecting daily workflows as
well as plans for the very future of the academic library. The stakes are
high, as the transformative nature of open access has the potential to affect
the culture of every discipline and all of the associated research which the
library has traditionally been charged with collecting, providing access to,
and preserving. Reference and instruction librarians, in their roles on the
front-lines, have tremendous ability to influence library user behaviour,
and could potentially provide a needed impetus to the momentum of the
open access movement. While there is ubiquitous talk about open access,
there is often little action on the part of librarians. It is necessary to study
the reasons for the lack of trickle-down as well as to discuss librarian
attitudes toward open access in their own work and behaviour.
Librarians are assumed to have much to gain by the eventual success
of open access to the world’s scholarly literature, especially in terms of
freeing libraries from the tyrannical pricing structures of commercial
journals. Stevan Harnad, Professor of Cognitive Science at the University
of Southampton, describes open access as the ‘toll-free online access to
the full text of scholarly peer-reviewed journals’ (Kaser and Ojala, 2005).
Peter Suber, another champion of open access, offers this definition in his
blog, OA News: ‘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’ (Suber, 2007a). The premise is that once
the refereed research literature is freed from tolls, authors will once again
be the owners of their scholarly output. In the words of Kaser and Ojala
(2005), the central question for all, whether librarian, scholar or
publisher, seems to be the same – what will this cost me? What role does
open access play in the everyday work of the academic librarian, whether
it be at the reference desk, in collection development, or various areas of
digital library development? How are open access initiatives, supposedly
promoted by librarians, affecting the library literature?
The LIS literature is rife with articles about all iterations of open access.
There are many comprehensive treatments in the literature outlining the
open access movement, from its beginnings in the 1990s to the state of the
art at present. Many of these articles describe the many ‘roads’ to open
access. Whether ‘green’, ‘gold’, or other, Harnad uses colour descriptions
2