Sunday, May 08, 2011

Open access: small victory over procrastination

Just posted a study published in Research Strategies in 1997, Information Literacy Skills: an exploratory focus group study of student perceptions. Why the delay? When I published the study, copyright was held by Research Strategies. The journal was subsequently bought by Elsevier, which has a green OA policy - for the author's own copy - but finding the author's copy for a 1997 article is not exactly easy. Neither was finding an author's agreement; a few years ago, I contacted Elsevier and asked them for a copy of the contract, but it turns out that they don't have one either. So now after a few more years of procrastinating I have finally posted the publishers' PDF - I am teaching scholarly communication and open access after all, and ought to be as good an example as I can - on the assumption that if no one has a contract, none exists. It would be helpful if IR managers and publishers alike would clarify permission in such circumstances - keep the author's self-archiving rights for the author's own work without embargo, but allow use of the publisher's PDF after say 3 years? Anyhow this study is now more widely available, having been posted in the SFU IR, UBC cIRcle, E-LIS, Mendeley, and Academia.edu, with links from Facebook and Twitter. Alas, I am not on any information literacy listservs. SWORD people - are you looking after all of these venues and more? A single upload could sure accomplish more dissemination with less keystrokes.