Blogs I Like: Short Sharp Science, Open Access Journals and the Coming Struggle

New Scientist publishes a number of blogs, and this is one to enjoy: Short Sharp Science, reporting brief science news. On Sept 20 2007 there was a post on Short Sharp Science entitled “Publishers Prepare for War over Open Access”. This got me to thinking about the changing nature of production and dissemination of scholarly or scientific information, and resultant management issues for academic libraries (and librarians). Following are a few websites or articles on Open Access if you’re interested:

• 2,833 journals are currently listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). There are 879 journals with searchable content on DOAJ.
  
• Institutions, libraries or research centers worldwide which support the open access initiative can be found on the DOAJ Directory of Members.
• PubMedCentral, supported by the National Institutes of Health, and the PMC journal list
  
• Currently there are 7 open access journals published on the Public Library of Science (PLoS) platform.
• BioMedCentral provides open access to 180 peer-reviewed journals. BMC also hosts a blog.
  
• SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) published this report in 2002: “The Case for Institutional Repositories” (available online free).
• Author Peter Suber has written Open Access Overview (June 2007) and writes the SPARC Open Access Newsletter. For more info about Peter Suber click here.
• Scholarly Communication: Science Librarians as Advocates for Change published in Summer 2007 issue of Issues in Science & Technology Librarianship website
• An excerpt from a newspaper article published in The Guardian Unlimited (UK) on Sept 18 2007 by Cory Doctorow entitled Free Data Sharing is Here to Stay : “Better access to more information is the hallmark of the information economy. The more IT we have, the more skill we have, the faster our networks get and the better our search tools get, the more economic activity the information economy generates”.
• Highwire Press provides 1.7 million articles on Open Access
• Creative Commons – Licensing of Content

Finally, a word about GoogleScholar. Users are, of course, always pleased to gain access to free articles. At the Reference desk, there are ongoing questions from students or faculty about what the GoogleScholar site is (or is not). GoogleScholar is a search engine owned and run by Google. If an individual publisher has entered into an agreement with Google to provide open access to their publications – then that article will be available free online. If the publisher has not, it won’t be found on GoogleScholar. Open Access is an entirely different objective (or outcome, if you will) than “free access”. GoogleScholar has links to free articles, but it isn’t an open access site in the same way that PubMedCentral is.