Librarians and Open Access

The purpose of this post is to gather thoughts on what librarians need to do to make open access a reality, as well as how open access will transform libraries and librarianship. For starters:

Question from SSHRC:
Canada's Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council is in the midst of a consultation process, designed to transform Canada's major research funder in these areas. The help of librarians has been requested - please see http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2005/06/question-from-sshrc.html. Further comments, questions, and suggestions, would be most welcome.

Promoting Open Access Resources
It makes perfect sense for libraries to be promoting open access resources, just as we do other resources, whether subscriptions or collections we have paid for, or free print materials we have been responsible for. There are enough resources out there, that these resources are very significant supplements already, for smaller libraries. For more info, see:
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2005/08/promoting-open-access.html
To illustrate just how significant OA resources already are, look at the library and information OA journals collection in the Directory of Open Access Journals, at http://www.doaj.org/ljbs?cpid=129 (39 journals as of August 5, 2005), and the E-LIS, E-Prints in Library and Information Science, at http://eprints.rclis.org/ (over 2,700 articles as of August 5, 2005). These two resources are already a much more substantial collection than any but the largest research libraries, or universities with library schools, would have enjoyed until very recently. There are more resources, too, of course - the library association journals that are going open access, and the articles librarians have placed in their institutional repositories.


Changing Roles of Librarians
This summarizes some very thoughtful discussion by SCHOLCOMM participants on what the future (and, in some cases, the present) roles of librarians might look like, in an open access work.

Nancy Sanchez Tarrago has written a very interesting article on new roles of librarians in education - see:
SANCHEZ TARRAGO, Nancy. THE INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL WITHIN THE EDUCATIVE CONTEXT IN THE LEARNING SOCIETY: SPACES AND COMPETENCES. ACIMED. [online]. Mar.-Apr. 2005, vol.13, no.2 [cited 30 August 2005], p.1-1. ISSN 1024-9435.


Last updated August 30, 2005