The October 1, 2007 issue of First Monday has just been released, featuring a selection of presentations at the First International PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference, including:
Morrison, Heather. Rethinking Collections: Libraries and Librarians in an Open Age
Abstract
Open access, one of the most important of the potentials unleashed by the combination of the electronic medium and the World Wide Web, is already much more substantial in extent that most of us realize. More than 10 percent of the world’s scholarly peer–reviewed journals are fully open access; this does not take into account the many journals offering hybrid open choice, free back access, or allowing authors to self–archive their works. Scientific Commons includes more than 16 million publications, nearly twice as much content as Science Direct. Meanwhile, even as we continue to focus on the scholarly peer–reviewed journal article, other potentials of the new technology are beginning to appear, such as open data and scholarly blogging. This paper examines the library collection of the near and medium future, suggests that libraries and librarians are in a key position to lead in the transition to an open age, and provides specific suggestions to aid in the transition.
and:
Transitioning to Open Access
Christina Struik, Hilde Coldenbrander, Stephen Warren, Halina de Maurivez, Heather Joseph, Denise Koufougiannakis, Heather Morrison, Kathleen Shearer, Kumiko Vezina, Andrew Waller
Abstract
This paper presents a summary of three presentations: Heather Joseph of the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) on key advocacy strategies, the Canadian Association of Research Libraries’s (CARL) Kathleen Shearer on the CARL Institutional Repository program and forthcoming CARL Author’s Addendum, and Heather Morrison on the Canadian Library Association’s (CLA) Task Force on Open Access. The presentations were followed by a one–hour workshop, with about 50 participants including librarians from Canada and elsewhere, publishers, and others. Workshop exercises, designed for the expert audience anticipated at the First International PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference, were developed to elicit a broad overview of open access initiatives underway, issues and barriers to open access, and solutions to overcome them. Participants reported being engaged in a wide variety of open access initiatives, from OA publishing and institutional repositories to a recent commitment to devote a percentage of a university budget to OA. Two solutions the workshop participants saw as key for open access were finding a funding solution (possibly re–deploying collections and acquisitions budgets or earmarking grants funds for knowledge transfer), and branding repositories as containing trustable material. The workshop portion could have been expanded considerably, to a half or full day. Results of the workshop will help to inform the work of the CLA Task Force on Open Access.
This issue of First Monday is the first produced using the free, open source Open Journal Systems.
This post is part of the Transitioning to Open Access Series.
