In the 10 December, 2010 Research Library Issue report (a bimonthly report from ARL, CNI, and SPARC) Prudence S. Adler, Associate Executive Director, Federal Relations and Information Policy, ARL, considers three critical attributes shared by the research, teaching, and learning enterprise and the Internet. They are a) providing access to research resources; b) promoting free speech; c) and fostering openness, innovation, and transparency.

The conclusion of the report (entitled Three Key Public Policies for Research Libraries: Net Neutrality, Fair Use, Open and Public Access) :

The ARL Strategic Plan calls for ARL to influence “laws, public policies, regulations, and judicial decisions governing the use of copyrighted materials so that they better meet the needs of the educational and research communities” and to contribute “to reducing economic, legal, and technical barriers to access and use of the research results from publicly funded research projects, enabling rapid and inexpensive worldwide dissemination of facts and ideas.” To succeed, research libraries are dependent upon a non-discriminatory, robust, open, technological infrastructure that will permit effective use of resources under copyright, in the public domain, and under other legal regimes. Such an infrastructure must encourage emerging scholarly communication models that realize the benefits of networked-based technologies and reflect the interests of the academy and the public.

The full report.

Fabian Society Online Archive

A London School of Economics (LSE) website particularly useful to historians of British history is the open access Fabian Society Online Archive. The Fabian Society started publishing tracts in 1884, and included in this site are most tracts up to 1997. There are about 580 tracts. Among the authors are Sidney and Beatrice Webb and George Bernard Shaw, founders of the LSE. Other famous authors include Clement Attlee; Tony Benn; Tony Blair; Gordon Brown; G. D. H. Cole; Tony Crosland; R. H. S. Crossman; Denis Healey; Harold Laski; Kingsley Martin; Harold Wilson.

Topics treated in the tracts include:

* cultural matters
* economics
* electoral reform
* foreign policy (such as colonialism, the Cold War and relations with Europe)
* industrial relations
* the Labour Party
* local government
* politics (such as electoral and parliamentary reform)
* poverty
* social reform (such as education, health and pensions)
* socialism
* women's issues

December issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter

Peter Suber's December issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter is now online. Particularly interesting is the section "The US elections and open access" where Suber considers at length the future of the FRPAA (Federal Research Public Access Act) bill which is presently before Congress. He believes that "because Congress is preoccupied with more urgent business, FRPAA has little chance as a stand-alone bill in the lame-duck session. If it expires without a vote at the end of this month, it or some variation of it will almost certainly be re-introduced in the new session. The new bill may be the same as the current FRPAA, which itself is the same as the version of FRPAA introduced in 2006, or may be revised to account for any executive action taken by President Obama in the meantime." Suber's prediction for the ultimate outcome of government mandated open access:

insofar as Republicans are inclined to work constructively for achievable progress, there will be some common ground with Democrats. That common ground will include creating jobs, stimulating the economy, opening government, showing fiscal responsibility with public funds, and mandating public access to publicly-funded research. That bodes well both for FRPAA and for an Obama executive order mandating OA from federal funding agencies. But insofar as Republicans are inclined to obstruct Democrats, reject their own party elders, or both, common ground will be a vanishing quantity. That plus Obama's tendency to seek compromise without reciprocation will mean defeat or dilution for OA policies.

Europeana Gives Open Access to Over 14 Million Examples of Europe's Cultural Heritage

Launched in 2008 with two million objects, the European digital library, Europeana, now provides free online access to over 14 million digitized books, maps, photographs, paintings, film and music clips from cultural institutions across Europe. Thus, Europeana has already passed the initial target for 2010 of 10 million objects.

From the press release:

Digitised photographs, maps, paintings, museum objects and other images make up 64% of the Europeana collection. 34% of the collection is dedicated to digitised texts, including more than 1.2 million complete books that can be viewed online and/or downloaded. The texts cover thousands of rare manuscripts and the earliest printed books (incunabula) from before 1500. Video and sound material represents less than 2% of the collections. Much of the material accessible through Europeana is older, i.e. out of copyright, items, due mainly to the difficulties and cost of rights clearance to digitise and give access to in-copyright material (even for material that is no longer commercially distributed or out-of-print) or material whose potential right-holders are unknown (orphan works).

The World Bank Launches a New Digital Collection

On 18 November, 2010 the World Bank announced the launching of the open access collection of all World Development Reports published since 1978. The Complete World Development Report Online may be accessed at http://wdronline.worldbank.org .

From the press release:

. . . . For over thirty years, the annual WDR has provided a window on development economics to a broad international readership. The report has served as one of the principal vehicles for encapsulating the World Bank’s knowledge of and policy recommendations on key global development trends. From agriculture and the environment to economic growth and international trade, the WDR has tracked theoretical and empirical findings as well as policies in the field of international development.

The robust search engine of The Complete World Development Report Online optimizes search both across and within all WDRs with the click of a button. In addition, the background papers upon which the most recent reports were drawn are also available.

A free optional individual user account allows users to take advantage of tools such as bookmarking and saving selected chapters or reports, saving searches, and taking notes. A custom eBook feature lets users select chapters from multiple reports for future reference, sharing with colleagues, or creating course packets. The custom eBooks may also be downloaded, printed, or easily shared through social networking sites. In addition, the site features quick links to World Bank open databases, RSS feeds, new content alerts, and COUNTER-compliant usage statistics for librarians . . . .

"Open Access at the Wellcome Trust: 5 Years On"

In 2006, the UK's Wellcome Trust, a major funder of research, specified that all research that resulted from its funding be made open access, that is, be freely available. However, for the first couple of years compliance by funding recipients was low. At the recent Berlin 8 meeting in Beijing, Robert Kiley, Head Digital Services, Wellcome Trust, in a presentation "Open Access at the Wellcome Trust: 5 Years On" showed that there has been significant increase in compliance since 2006 -- it is now around 50%. Kiley, stating that there is still a long way to go, considers what other steps Wellcome Trust should take to improve compliance with its OA mandate.

Kiley also discusses the goal of transforming UK's PubMed Central into a Europe PMC, that is "a single, Europe-wide, repository where all European-funded, peer-reviewed, biomedical research papers can be accessed, data-mined and integrated into other related information sources".

The Conclusion of Open Access Week 2010

A very encouraging letter from SPARC re the conclusion of Open Access Week 2010:

The largest, most successful International Open Access Week yet has just come to a close. With just under 900 participants in 94 countries, this year’s event was no less than three times larger than it was just a year ago. Hundreds of videos, photos, blog posts, and more were released to promote and highlight the benefits of Open Access to research and take the conversation even more deeply into the research community – and they absolutely did. . . .

More

Impressive Open Access Stats from MIT

Interesting news from MIT about its ongoing success with its year-old campus wide open access policy. In the past year there have been added "1,900 scholarly articles to the MIT Open Access articles collection in DSpace@MIT". http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/open-access-1020.html

New BC Library Guide on Copyright

BC Libraries has just released a new guide entitled Copyright and Scholarship. The primary purpose of the guide is to give guidance for resolving basic copyright questions. (There's a link to it on the right of this blog under heading: Related Library Pages). The guide includes information on:

Key Concepts

• Copyright
• Public Domain
• Fair Use
• Author Rights
• Open Access

Processes

• How to Get Copyright
• How to Get Permission
• Reserves & Classroom

Types of Content

• Electronic Theses & Dissertations
• Film & Video
• Music & Images

It is important to bear in mind that the guide is designed to provide basic, general information about copyright, and does not constitute legal advice.

October SPARC Open Access Newsletter

Peter Suber has published the October issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter. It is the 150th issue of the Newsletter. In it Suber "takes a close look at my own experience self-archiving, how I was an easier case than many other authors, how I was a harder case, and why I needed so long to move beyond a personal web site to an OA repository."

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Stanford University News recently published an update about its very heavily visited website: The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The article's author, Cynthia Haven, stresses the authoritativeness of the Encyclopedia which was launched in 1995, years before both Google and Wikipedia. Visited over 700,000 times a week, the Encyclopedia has more than 1,200 entries authored by over 1,400 individuals. Contribtions are overseen by 120 leading philosophers from all over the world while Stanford's Dept. of Philosophy is the advisory board. Thus, "[N]o one can alter text without passing through several layers of approval."

Excerpts:

It's September, and as school resumes, so does the wrangling between students and teachers across the country over the reliability of Wikipedia and other Internet sources as fodder for footnotes in research papers.

The debate has been going on for years. When philosopher Larry Sanger left Wikipedia – the project he co-founded – he said its "anti-elitism" was the root of its shortcomings. He said that because pretty much anyone could write anything, expertise was mistrusted and those committed to mayhem or propaganda could too easily dominate the medium.

But he did recommend an online alternative: the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. . . .

The Latest Version of Open Access Bibliography Available

Here is Charles Bailey's announcement about the online publication of his bibliography of material on open access and its effect on academic scholarship:

Transforming Scholarly Publishing through Open Access: A
Bibliography is now available from Digital Scholarship:

http://digital-scholarship.org/tsp/transforming.htm

This bibliography presents over 1,100 selected
English-language scholarly works useful in understanding the
open access movement's efforts to provide free access to and
unfettered use of scholarly literature. The bibliography
primarily includes books and published journal articles. A
limited number of book chapters, conference papers,
dissertations and theses, magazine articles, technical
reports, and other scholarly works that are deemed to be of
exceptional interest are also included (see the "Preface"
for further details about selection criteria). The
bibliography includes links to freely available versions of
included works. Most sources have been published from
January 1, 1999 through August 1, 2010; however, a limited
number of key sources published prior to 1999 are also
included. The bibliography is available as a paperback and
an open access PDF file.

The following Digital Scholarship publications may also be
of interest:

(1) Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography, version 78

http://digital-scholarship.org/sepb/sepb.html

(2) Digital Scholarship 2009 (paperback and open access PDF
file)

http://digital-scholarship.org/sepb/annual/ds2009.htm

(3) Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography: 2008
Annual Edition (paperback, Kindle e-book, and open access
PDF file)

http://digital-scholarship.org/sepb/annual/sepb2008.htm

(4) Digital Curation and Preservation Bibliography,
version 1

http://digital-scholarship.org/dcpb/dcpb.htm

Translate (oversatta, oversette, prelozit, traducir,
traduire, tradurre, traduzir, or ubersetzen):

http://digital-scholarship.org/announce/tsp.htm

The Open Access Imperative

Katharine Dunn, Dean's Editorial Fellow, Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Science, provides a good overview of the history, the present state, and the importance of the Open Access movement. It's entitled "The Open Access Imperative".

Open Access Monograph Publishing

Maria Bonn, associate university librarian for publishing at the University of Michigan Library, has published "Free exchange of ideas: Experimenting with the open access monograph" in the latest issue of College & Research Libraries News. It's an interesting article that stresses the differences between OA journal and OA book publishing. Though a strong proponent of the latter, Bonn provides an excellent analysis of the challenges, as well as the opportunities, of applying open access models to monograph publishing.

SPARC Open Access Newsletter (Sept. issue)

Peter Suber published today (September 2, 2010 ) the latest issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter (issue #149).

Open Access Can be Successful

Barbara Fister recently posted in Inside Higher Education an upbeat blog item about the potential of Open Access, "Open to Change: How Open Access Can Work". Excerpts:

Last week, when I challenged readers to think about how to make open access happen, Jason Baird Jackson had a ready answer: the Open Folklore project. This project is drawing a terrific map for societies unsure of how to proceed. Partnering with Indiana University libraries, the American Folklore Society is identifying where their literature is and how much of it is accessible, bringing attention to existing and potential open access journals, asking rights holders if material can be set free, digitizing gray literature so it will be preserved . . . these folks are sharp. And they're doing what scholarly societies should do: promoting the field and sharing its collective knowledge for the greater good.

I just visited their site again after reading a thoughtful article by Ted Striphas on the bizarre blind spot that cultural studies scholars have about the system that they depend on for conveying ideas and (perhaps even in their wildest dreams) making a difference in the world. He points out that cultural studies often unpacks the politics of media - except for those media that they participate in most frequently. He takes issue with the claim that I and others make repeatedly, that they system is broken. He says on the contrary, "the system is functioning only too well" - it rakes in terrific profits based largely on unpaid labor and a captive workforce. It just doesn't work very well for scholars, He does a great job of analyzing the issues and laying out steps that cultural studies scholars should take. It's a rousing call to action, and it's perfectly tailored to the concerns of his field. . . .

Sometimes I think about the tangle of cross-purposes and interests that seem so hard to disentangle and wonder if change can ever happen. But then I read something as sensible and smart and principled as Jason Baird Jackson's commentary or see what Open Folklore is up to and think ... you know, maybe we really can pull this off.

Web Alternative to Peer Review

From today's New York Times, page one (by Patricia Cohen):

Scholars Test Web Alternative to Peer Review


"For professors, publishing in elite journals is an unavoidable part of university life. The grueling process of subjecting work to the up-or-down judgment of credentialed scholarly peers has been a cornerstone of academic culture since at least the mid-20th century.
Now some humanities scholars have begun to challenge the monopoly that peer review has on admission to career-making journals and, as a consequence, to the charmed circle of tenured academe. They argue that in an era of digital media there is a better way to assess the quality of work. Instead of relying on a few experts selected by leading publications, they advocate using the Internet to expose scholarly thinking to the swift collective judgment of a much broader interested audience." More

APS Online Journals Available Free in U.S. Public Libraries

In an interesting move the American Physical Society is making all issues of its journals freely available to readers in public libraries. From its 28 July announcement:

The American Physical Society (APS) announces a new public access initiative that will give readers and researchers in public libraries in the United States full use of all online APS journals, from the most recent articles back to the first issue in 1893, a collection including over 400,000 scientific research papers. APS will provide this access at no cost to participating public libraries, as a contribution to public engagement with the ongoing development of scientific understanding.

APS Publisher Joseph Serene observed that "public libraries have long played a central role in our country’s intellectual life, and we hope that through this initiative they will become an important avenue for the general public to reach our research journals, which until now have been available only through the subscriptions at research institutions that currently cover the significant costs of peer review and online publication."

Librarians can obtain access by accepting a simple online site license and providing valid IP addresses of public-use computers in their libraries. The license requires that public library users must be in the library when they read the APS journals or download articles. Initially the program will be offered to U.S. public libraries, but it may include additional countries in the future. . . .

Movie Clips and Copyright

From Inside Higher Ed, July 28th:

If the words “sweeping new exemptions to the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act” make you want whoop for joy and join a conga line, you just might be a fair use advocate — one who wants professors and students to be able to decrypt and excerpt copyrighted video content for lectures and class projects. Since Monday, a lot of advocates have been dancing.

“This is very exciting,” says Patricia Aufderheide, a communications professor and director of the Center for Social Media at American University. “We’re doing nothing but chat about this, we’re so excited.”

The thing that has made so many professors abuzz — and a-blog — is the latest round of rule changes, issued Monday by the U.S. Copyright Office, dealing with what is legal and what is not as far as decrypting and repurposing copyrighted content.

One change in particular is making waves in academe: an exemption that allows professors in all fields and “film and media studies students” to hack encrypted DVD content and clip “short portions” into documentary films and “non-commercial videos.”

 Read the full article

The Old Bailey Proceedings Online Project

The Old Bailey Proceedings Online is a vast and fascinating open access database that provides access to over two hundred years of full-text proceedings of British trials.

"The Old Bailey Proceedings Online makes available a fully searchable, digitised collection of all surviving editions of the Old Bailey Proceedings from 1674 to 1913, and of the Ordinary of Newgate's Accounts between 1676 and 1772. It allows access to over 197,000 trials and biographical details of approximately 2,500 men and women executed at Tyburn, free of charge for non-commercial use.

In addition to the text, accessible through both keyword and structured searching, this website provides digital images of all 190,000 original pages of the Proceedings, 4,000 pages of Ordinary's Accounts, advice on methods of searching this resource, information on the historical and legal background to the Old Bailey court and its Proceedings, and descriptions of published and manuscript materials relating to the trials covered. Contemporary maps, and images have also been provided."

House Committee to Hold Hearing on OA to Federally Funded Research

The Alliance for Tax Payer Access announced in a press release that a House Committee will hold a hearing on 29 July on open access to federally funded research:

The U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Information Policy, the Census and National Archives announced it will hold a hearing on the issue of public access to federally funded research on Thursday, July 29. The hearing will provide an opportunity for the Committee to hear the perspectives of a broad range of stakeholders on the potential impact of opening up access to the results of the United States’ more than $60 billion annual investment in scientific research.

The Subcommittee’s interest stems from the growing number of visible expressions of interest in the issue of public access that have surfaced in recent months, in both the Legislative and Executive branches of government. Notably, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy earlier this year hosted a Public Access Policy Forum on mechanisms that would leverage federal investments in scientific research and increase access to information.

Additionally, H.R. 5037, the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), which was introduced into the House on April 15 by Rep. Mike Doyle (R-PA) and is supported by a growing bi-partisan host of cosponsors, was referred to the Committee. The bill, and its identical Senate counterpart (introduced by Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and John Cornyn (R-TX)), proposes to require those eleven federal agencies with extramural research budgets of $100 million or more to implement policies that deliver timely, free, online public access to the published results of the research they fund. . . .

Digital Project of the Medieval Academy of America

The Medieval Academy of America reports a retrospective digitization project of its publications:

The National Endowment for the Humanities, Division of Research Programs, has awarded the Academy $120,000 to support “Retrospective Digital Editions of Print Editions Published by The Medieval Academy of America, 1925–2001.” The two-year grant will make it possible for the Academy to digitize thirty-eight editions published by Medieval Academy Books from the Academy’s foundation to 2001. In addition to editions of Medieval Latin, the project will digitize these major vernaculars: Arabic, Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, and Welsh. Poetry and music are found in addition to prose works. By treating literary, philosophical, scientific, commercial, documentary, political, and religious texts, the project will provide multiple points of entry to the Middle Ages.

Half of the thirty-eight editions are out of print, and those titles in print and published before 1982 were printed on acidic paper and are therefore beginning to disintegrate. Digitization will obviate the problem of acidic paper and offer an extra dimension of accesssibility, for these texts will be findable through electronic search engines. Searchability will extend use of the material beyond the self-defined circle of medievalists, thus bringing the Academy’s commitment to interdisciplinary scholarship to a new level. The books will be accessible free of charge on the Academy’s website. . . .

Some beta versions of the Academy's digital editions.

Millions of Books get Digitized for the Disabled

USA Today reports that the Internet Archive is embarking on a new campaign to double the number of digitized books available for print disabled people:

For those who are blind, dyslexic or have diseases like multiple sclerosis and have difficulty turning book pages, reading the latest best seller just got easier.

Brewster Kahle, a digital librarian and founder of a virtual library called the Internet Archive, has launched a worldwide campaign to double the number of books available for print-disabled people.

The Internet Archive began scanning books in 2004 and now has more than 1 million available in DAISY format, or Digital Accessible Information System, a means of creating "talking" books that can be downloaded to a handheld device. Unlike books on tape, the digital format makes it easier for print-disabled people to navigate books because they can speed up, slow down and skip around from chapter to chapter. . . .

Christopher Danielsen, spokesman for the National Federation of the Blind, says the Internet Archive will benefit the 1.3 million blind people in the USA because it will increase the variety of books available to the population. Danielsen says only about 5% of published books are transferred to a format the blind can use. . . .

Kahle says the Internet Archive is an invaluable resource for dyslexic, blind and print-disabled students who can use the digital book collection to download reference materials and write research papers. He encourages teachers to send in books that will be on reading lists for the next school year. If received now, the books can be scanned during the summer and available online when school resumes in the fall.

The Internet Archive will cover the expenses of scanning the first 10,000 books it receives but is asking people to donate to help continue scanning.

June's SPARC Open Access Newsletter

The June, 2010 issue of Peter Suber's SPARC Open Access Newsletter is now available.

Springer Introduces New Open Access Journals

On 28 June Springer announced the establishment of a new open-access journal program entitled SpringerOpen. To start, SpringerOpen will publish 12 new, peer-reviewed, e-only journals covering science, technical, and medical disciplines.

From the press release:

Springer is expanding its open access offering to all disciplines. . . within the science, technology and medicine (STM) fields and will be offered in cooperation with BioMed Central. The entire content of SpringerOpen journals – including research articles, reviews, and editorials – are fully and immediately open access, and are accessible to anyone with an internet connection. No subscription is needed. . . .

SpringerOpen journals are e-only journals. Springer is committed to delivering high-quality articles and ensuring rapid publication as with its traditional journals, from online submission systems and in-depth peer review to an efficient, author-friendly production process. The final articles are not only published in a timely manner on Springer’s online information platform SpringerLink, but are also distributed to archives such as PubMed Central and to institutional repositories as requested.

SpringerOpen journals are published under the Creative Commons Attribution license, which facilitates the open distribution of copyrighted work. According to this license, Springer will not reserve any exclusive commercial rights. The journals ask the authors to pay an article-processing charge, in accordance with market standards. . . .

From Partition to Direct Rule: 50 Years of Northern Ireland Parliamentary Debates Online

The Stormont Papers is a particularly useful site for historians of Britain and Ireland. Entitled "From Partition to Direct Rule: 50 Years of Northern Ireland Parliamentary Debates Online" the website offers access to the Parliamentary Debates of the devolved government of Northern Ireland from June 7 1921 to the dissolution of Parliament in March 28 1972. Consisting of about 92,000 printed pages (74 million words) the site is fully open access.

One may search either the full text using specific keywords, browse particular debates according to the combined subject index, or simply view the volumes.

Large Gift Will Speed Digitization at Oxford's Bodleian Libraries

News item from Ian Wilhelm in yesterday's Chronicle of Higher Education:

A British philanthropist has given $2.2-million to the University of Oxford's Bodleian Libraries to expand efforts to digitize their vast collection of books and manuscripts.

The gift, by the businessman Leonard S. Polonsky, will help pay for a new digital-imaging studio as part of a $115.6-million renovation of the New Bodleian Library, which will be known as the Weston Library upon reopening in a few years. The facility will be used to scan and make available online Oxford's most valuable and fragile documents and publications.

In addition, the donation will support the Bodleian's current efforts to digitize materials that promote interdisciplinary research and scholarship. For example, in 2010 and 2011 the library system plans to digitize Oxford theses and rare Islamic and Jewish manuscripts.

The money will help the Bodleian give humanities scholars and other academics greater access to its 11-million volume collection, only a "small fraction" of which has been digitized so far, said Sarah E. Thomas, the institution's librarian.

Mr. Polonsky, an alumnus of Oxford's Lincoln College, made a similar gift this month to the Cambridge University Library. The donor, who is executive chairman of Hansard Global, a financial-services company, said in a written statement that being part of a sea change in how a library operates was "exhilarating."

"Our inherited notions of 'library'—its architecture, scale, content, and services—will undergo quite extraordinary change over the coming years as digitization extends its impact," he said.

Open Access: Wittgenstein Archives

The Wittgenstein Archives at The University of Bergen recently provided free access to a large body of Wittgenstein primary sources, including the Bergen Facsimile Edition (BFE) and the Bergen Text Edition (BTE) of 5000 pages of Wittgenstein's Nachlass. Access is

http://www.wittgensteinsource.org/

Portico Announces It Has Reached a Milestone

In the past when print was the only form of publication, scholars would assume that the products of their work would live long lives on library shelves as books and journal articles. In today's publishing environment where electronic publications are proliferating, scholars may have serious doubts about the longevity of their work if they publish on the web. In an effort to address their concerns, several digital preservation projects have been developed in recent years. One of the most important is Portico. This means that the library's e-journals produced by publishers signed up with Portico will remain available to future researchers regardless of changes in technology. A recent announcement from Portico administrators provides some numbers that give an idea of how far Portico has progressed:

Portico is pleased to announce that 110 publishers, representing more than 2,000 professional and scholarly societies, are now participating in the Portico archive. Furthermore, nearly 15 million articles are now safely preserved in the Portico archive. "These are significant milestones for Portico and this substantial growth in a short period of time underscores the importance of digital preservation, and the commitment of the hundreds of Portico's participating libraries and publishers to ensuring long-term access to scholarly content," said Eileen Fenton, Portico's Managing Director.

Publishing in Open Access Education Journals: The Authors' Perspectives

In the April, 2010 issue of Behavioral & Social Sciences Librarian Bryna Coonin and Leigh M. Younce authored the article "Publishing in Open Access Education Journals: The Authors’ Perspectives". The Abstract:

Open access publishing is now an accepted method of scholarly communication. However, the greatest traction for open access publishing thus far has been in the sciences. Penetration of open access publishing has been much slower among the social sciences. This study surveys 309 authors from recent issues of open access journals in education to determine why they choose to publish in open access journals and to gain insight into the ways publishing practices within the discipline itself impact the willingness of authors to engage in open access publishing.

From the Conclusion:

Scholars work and teach in institutions, but the vitality of their scholarly lives is derived from the reception of their work by peers within their disciplines. The education researchers surveyed confirmed that peer review is of primary importance in their publishing activity. Among education researchers, though, the impetus to share the fruits of research with the practitioner community is historically strong. Open access publication enhances the options for accomplishing this.

There remains some confusion regarding the issue of electronic journal versus print publishing. For subject liaisons discussing open access publishing with faculty, it may be important to establish that the concept of open access is not the same as a format change from print to electronic. Another potential source of confusion is self-archiving. A major trend within the scholarly communication arena, self-archiving appears to respond to somewhat different stimuli than the impulse to engage in OA publishing. Liaison librarians working with faculty on these issues cannot assume that participation in one of these activities automatically implies interest in the other.

Increasingly, open access overall represents a leading edge in scholarly publishing rather than the “fringe.” However, an understanding (and acceptance) of open access journal publishing as a viable outlet for scholarly publishing is still quite dependent on the research and publishing cultures within the disciplines. It may be helpful for liaison librarians to keep in mind that issues concerning open access crystallize at different times for different individuals. For some, clarification develops as scholars become more aware of scholarly communication generally. Others may give the matter little or no thought until open access is discussed in a forum within their narrow discipline, among colleagues they hold in high regard.

. . . . Advocacy for open access is the ideal, but such a stance may not be possible for every subject liaison. Increasing awareness of open access among our academic faculty, however, remains an important and reasonable goal for librarians. Increasing one's own awareness and knowledge of the relevant trends, coupled with patience, is recommended.