jandawson.net

Science information is paving the way for open access (OA) by being the fastest growing OA field. Two roads are driving this development: the gold road, which refers to open access publishing; and the green road, which refers to open access self-archiving.

Kumiko Vezina, Electronic Resources Coordinator at Concordia University, was a guest lecturer on Open Access in our Science & Technical Information class this evening. Vezina has been performing research on open access science information in Quebec, which you can read about on page 8 of the Winter 2007 issue of Bibliofile. She administered a survey to science faculty in six educational institutions and was pleased with her response rate of 20% (anything above 13% is good!). Some results: more than half of the faculty surveyed were aware of OA, 27% of the faculty members had published in OA journals, 87% of faculty members didn’t know if there was an institutional repository in Quebec, 86% did not know if their own institution owned a repository, 83% would comply to deposit copies of articles in an oa archive if it was manditory at their institution. Conclusions: faculty are interested, but are lacking information.

The oldest OA archive is arXiv, a physics archive. Some other major repositories are: HighWire Press, PubMed Central, E-LIS, D-LIST

Anyone interested in self-archiving should check out the RoMEO tool. You can perform a search for a journal to find out if you can self-archive.

Who should fund OA publishing? (university libraries, administration, individual authors, funding agencies, government, combinations?)

Keep informed about OA issues and happenings with the OA Librarian.