E-Journals Access and Management

Wayne Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781135696092
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The proliferation of e-journals and their impact on library collections is tremendous. E-Journals Access and Management takes a comprehensive look at how e-journals have changed the library landscape and offers librarians strategies to better manage them. This useful resource provides a broad overview of the practical and theoretical issues associated with the management of electronic journals, and contains practical and illuminating case studies of problems faced and solutions found in individual libraries. Containing chapters by respected authorities on this dynamic topic of debate, E-Journals Access and Management presents vital information on a full range of issues dealing with electronic resource access and management, including bibliographic and web access, acquisitions, and licensing.

PART I:
THE DIGITAL ENVIRONMENT

Chapter 1
Electronic Resources: The New Frontier for Academic Libraries

Kathleen Shearer

INTRODUCTION

The information resources available to support research and education are increasingly available in digital format. This new frontier has been rapidly populated over the last ten years with an explosion of electronic resources (e-resources) in the form of newspapers, magazines, journals, books, data, images, music and other audio, videos, Web sites, geographic information, and so on. The electronic frontier offers the potential of integrating text, visual images, data, simulations, and sound. Responsibilities and relationships are in flux and the role of the library is still under discussion. This chapter will present some of the major trends in e-journals and other e-resources and discuss some of the implications for academic libraries.

LICENSING

Information wants to be free and information wants to be expensive— and technology is constantly making this tension worse.¹ This statement, paraphrased from technology guru Stewart Brand, reflects two of the major trends occurring in the digital environment. Since the mid-1980s, the average price of an academic journal has risen more than three times that of the consumer price index.² Libraries have struggled to keep pace and have been devoting more and more of their budgets to buying journals. In response to this hyperinflation in the journal market, research libraries have turned to consortial site licensing as a means to increase their buying power. Licensing, basically, entails access to an aggregation of e-journals that publishers offer for a single price. Site licenses are usually negotiated by libraries as a group, and they secure access to journals at a smaller portion of the cost compared with subscribing as an individual library.

Licensing has greatly hastened the adoption of e-journals in Canada as elsewhere and it has brought with it financial benefits, especially for smaller institutions. However, there are also a number of concerns about the long-term impact of licensing. A recent article summarizes many of the objections: “Librarians lament the lack of choice, loss of fluidity in materials expenditures, and nondisclosure agreements that prevent libraries and consortia from comparing purchase prices.”³ The practice of licensing bundles journals in a way that makes it difficult to cancel individual titles. Some librarians are also worried that licensing will result in libraries dropping subscriptions to other smaller journals that are not published by the larger academic publishers, thereby driving smaller publishers out of business.

OPEN ACCESS

At the other end of the economic spectrum, the open access (OA) movement has also been gaining significant momentum. Open access calls for the free availability of journal articles through publishing in OA journals or self-archiving in OA repositories. As of October 2006 (at the time of writing), the Directory of Open Access Journals listed just over 2,400 OA journals.⁴ This represents a significant jump from two years ago when there were just 326 journals listed. Canadian academic libraries, for example, are building institutional repositories to house and make available the research output of their faculty members. So far, the collections in these repositories have grown more slowly than anticipated. However, this may soon change as we are beginning to see significant policy decisions put in place.

The argument that the public should have free access to the results of taxpayer-funded research resonates strongly with funding agencies that fund research in support of the public good. In May 2005, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the United States, the primary federal agency funding American medical research, implemented a policy requesting its funded researchers to deposit their work in NIH’s archive called PubMed Central within a year of publication. As the policy was voluntary, approximately only 4 percent of NIH-funded researchers had complied with it a year after it was implemented. Other funding agencies will undoubtedly take these low participation rates into account when considering implementing similar policies.

Research Councils UK (RCUK), which is an umbrella agency for the eight U.K. federal funding agencies, implemented a public access policy in June 2006. Among other things, the policy states: “Ideas and knowledge derived from publicly-funded research must be made available and accessible for public use, interrogation and scrutiny, as widely, rapidly and effectively as practicable.”⁵ The policy has left it up to each of the individual funding agencies to determine how to implement this, and so far four of them are mandating that publications coming from their funded research be made open access after an embargo period.

In Canada, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council endorsed open access in principle, in October 2004, but is still pursuing consultations to determine how the agency will implement open access. In October 2006, the Canadian Institutes for Health Research issued a draft policy for the products of research that would mandate open access to CIHR-funded research publications within six months of their publication (via OA journals or OA archives).⁶ It is likely only a matter of time before self-archiving into OA repositories is considered a normal and necessary part of the process of disseminating one’s research results. We as librarians must be poised to respond to the adoption of these types of OA policies.

Many journal publishers now offer a “pay-per-download” option for purchasing individual articles. In a digital world, information can be broken down into smaller pieces; it can be repackaged in different ways and distributed in different combinations. This has led some to predict the eventual unraveling of the journal in favor of the article as the major unit of consumption. Furthermore, the various functions associated with publication, such as metadata creation, peer review, and preservation, can be separated.

DIGITIZATION AND PRESERVATION

Digital monographs, while not as prolific as e-journals and databases, are gaining momentum. For years, the book industry has been trying to bring e-books into the mainstream, but the public still prefers to read books in print. This is likely to change very soon as manufacturers begin to debut more sophisticated e-book readers. The industry will also have to adopt common standards so that there is interoperability among all e-books and e-readers. Once these issues are worked out, it is likely e-books will flourish.

Retrospective digitization of monographs and other analog material is also moving ahead at full speed. In the last two years, numerous large-scale digitization initiatives have been launched. These initiatives foster a vision of the Web as a kind of universal library containing much of the world’s published monographs, music, films, photographs, and other cultural material in digital form. The Google project has probably garnered the most attention. In December 2004, Google Print was launched to digitally scan published monographs and make the text searchable through its search engine. One aspect of the project involves the digitization of large collections of books from several large libraries (initially Harvard University, Stanford University, University of Michigan, University of Oxford, and New York Public Library but others have since joined). The other facet of the Google Print project is working with publishers to digitize their books.

Since then, other similar digitization initiatives have been announced. On September 30, 2005, the EU strategy was unveiled and proposes a concerted effort by member states to digitize, preserve, and make a wide range of heritage material available on the Internet. On October 3, 2005, the Open Content Alliance (OCA) announced its intention to digitize a range of material including cultural, historical, and technological digitized print and multimedia content from libraries, archives, and publishers. The AlouetteCanada initiative is the latest to be introduced and it is Canada’s large-scale digitization effort. The project is spearheaded by the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL), but is seeking participation from non-CARL libraries and other cultural organizations. The goal is to create, disseminate, preserve, and sustain the knowledgebase of Canadian memory organizations in digital form. With the exception of the Google project, all of these initiatives are targeting out-of-copyright material; if they are sustained over time, they will provide a wealth of digital resources for the public and researchers, and will bring us one step closer to the vision outlined in an American Council of Learned Societies’ report on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities &Social Sciences: “an integrated digital representation of the cultural record, connecting its disparate parts and making the resulting whole more available to one and all, over the network.”⁷

The growing reuse and repurposing of data in research has drawn attention to the lack of comprehensive stewardship in this area. In 2003, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) issued a report calling for the immediate archiving of publicly funded research data. The report argues that ensuring easy access to research data is a matter of sound stewardship of public resources. As research becomes increasingly global, there is a growing need to systematically address data access and sharing issues beyond national jurisdictions. The Canadian report that was produced out of the National Consultation on Access to Scientific Research Data (NCASRD) echoes these sentiments. It makes the following prediction about the research world in 2020:

Open, but secure, access to powerful and globally assembled data has transformed scientific research. Researchers routinely analyze problems of previously unimaginable complexity in months, rather than decades, leading to revelations of knowledge and discovery that have enriched quality of life, transformed healthcare, improved social equality, provided greater security, broadened decision perspectives for social, environmental, and economic policy and advancement, and transformed the advancement of human knowledge.⁸

If this vision is actualized, data will become an extremely important resource in the future.

SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION

According to Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), content consumers are becoming more and more format agnostic: they do not care what sort of container the content is packaged in, as long as they get it.⁹ This is also true in the research environment where the traditional distinctions between informal scholarly communication and formal scholarly publishing are blurring. There has been vigorous growth in forms of electronic communication that take advantage of the unique capabilities of the Web but simply do not fit into the traditional journal/monograph publishing format. Furthermore, in the digital environment, nontextual modes of communication are as easily created as the traditional research article. It is likely that these other forms will diminish the importance of text in the scholarly communication environment. All of these nontraditional resources are growing because they tend to be much more effective or efficient means of communicating and disseminating research results.

Until now, the e-resources made available through academic libraries have largely been based on an analogy with traditional resources. However, the digital environment offers the potential to profoundly reshape the practice, documentation, and communication of research. Tom Storey of OCLC describes the next generation of the Web as having moved “from simply being sites and search engines to a shared network space that drives work, research, education, entertainment and social activities—essentially everything people do.”¹⁰ The report issued by the Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities &Social Sciences predicts “intensive collaboration among scholars as well as cooperation with librarians, curators, and archivists, the involvement of experts in the sciences, law, business, and entertainment, and active participation from and endorsement by the general public.”¹¹ Social functionalities facilitated by the Web, such as online collaboration and social networking, foreshadow the paradigm-shifting changes to come in research and education. A recent example of this is the “We Are Smarter Than Me” project at the MIT Collective Intelligence Laboratory that launched the first wiki project to publish a book. The book will be written by hundreds if not thousands of authors using wiki technology.¹²

The rapidly evolving practice of e-research/e-science will undoubtedly have a profound influence on research communications. RCUK defines e-science as “large scale science that will increasingly be carried out through distributed global collaborations enabled by the Internet.”¹³ A report written by a group of scientists looking into the role of e-sc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• About the Editor
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Part I: The Digital Environment
• Part II: Licensing, Acquisition, and Collection
• Part III: Access—Cataloging, Metadata, and the Web
• Part IV: Electronic Resource Management Systems
• Part V: Staffing and Workflow
• Part VI: The Future