Scholarly Communication Issues

Rick Kopak in his abstract to his article Open Access and the Open Journal Systems: Making Sense All Over states,

At a time when students are increasingly turning to the Web as their primary source of information it is well worth continuing to consider ways and means of taking advantage of this trend, and to perhaps relocate attention to traditional information sources presented in new ways. This paper makes the case that Open Access to electronic scholarly journals creates an opportunity for schools and school libraries to benefit from use of these journals.

The source, a biannual journal School Libraries Worldwide, is only available online at a membership fee. Neither UTK nor my more local Vanderbilt library had this journal in their database. Is this UTK's or Vandy's responsibility to purchase yet another e-journal? Is it the journal's to find a way to make itself accessible, especially after publishing an article that makes a case for open access?

Editor-in-Chief of School Library Journal, Brian Kenney, wrote an editorial on September 1, 2008 bemoaning "the lack of online availability of professional literature published by the American Library Association (ALA). He notes that while librarians advocate for open access to journal content, their professional association has failed to make its own content freely accessible." September 2, 2008 8:00am American Libraries Editor-in-Chief, Leonard Kniffel, posted this comment to Kenney's editorial,

The ALA Membership, Publishing, and American Libraries Advisory Committees all discussed this issue at the ALA Annual Conference in Anaheim. A proposal to open up all the content of American Libraries, as well as subscriptions to American Libraries Direct, received virtually unanimous support, and we will be doing so this fall, after the launch of the new ALA website.

It's just fascinating to me that this new knowledge - this post, this comment - is out there for me, an ordinary web searcher, to find because the source chose to make it free and online and accessible. They enabled the conversation to continue.

It seems scholarly communication concepts are crawling into to K-12 conversations. Hopefully they are successful and next lead to best practices.

UPDATE (25 September 2008):

Since posting last week I've been engaged in a wonderful email discussion with Gavin Baker of Open Access News. What began as a simple, generous offer of where I could find the article I said I couldn't find evolved into an interesting (for me!) examination of my assumptions about OA.

Whereas, like Mr. Baker mentioned, conventional wisdom observes students google first and then "resort" to databases second, I began and restricted my search in my university's databases. Here was my first assumption (or perhaps misconception) - OA should resemble institutional repositories. If the information/article is somewhere in the bowels of the university - library catalog, department website - it, in its full-text form, should be available. Clearly a library's paid database subscriptions believe differently, which is most likely the reason for my second assumption - the responsibility of making information accessible is the publisher's. When I was unsuccessful in accessing the full-text in the databases I googled the publication hoping to find it on their site.

The article wasn't available at my university, so I went to the publisher. It wasn't available (for free) from the publisher, so I stopped my search. I stopped my search at the "golden road," where journals are the ones responsible for providing OA to the articles they publish (Harnad, 2004). What I didn't consider were the other two roads - "green" where authors provide the OA or [insert-favorite-color-here] where a third party provides the OA nor necessarily with the author's not the publishing journal's permission. It is because of this third road that a simple Google search of my elusive article's title returned at least a few avenues for me to follow, complete with full-text.

The most fascinating part of this examination happened this morning as I retraced my steps. School Libraries Worldwide, where I stopped my search because I had to pay to receive full-text access, hosts three blogs - one that is exclusive to Volume 14, Number 2, July 2008 themed New Learners, New Literacies, New Libraries. Here guest editors Marlene Asselini and Ray Doiron have included "the abstracts and links to all the articles in this special issue of School Libraries Worldwide." They have also created a wiki (linked from the blog) for this important discussion. It is through this wiki that one is able to download a .pdf of the Kopak article.

So. Turns out the publisher does provide open access to this article. Kind of. One must leave the publisher's main site to travel to the blog, and then access the article via the wiki. But this is the only issue with its own blog, still leaving all other articles published by School Library Worldwide unavailable via their site. Should it be so convoluted? Yes, one Google search will get me the article, but for the sake of quality control, I guess I remain convinced that the golden road should be more...golden? As well as perhaps being encouraged to assist those trudging along the green road.

Thanks to Gavin Baker for the discussion and thanks to open access for my name and this humble post popping up on a Google search more times than I ever thought possible.

~bryn samuels