OA in the Library Collection

Bishop, Andrew

Bulock, C., Hosburgh, N., Mann, S. (2015). OA in the Library Collection: The Challenges of Identifying and Maintaining Open Access Resources, The Serials Librarian 68(1-4). 79-86. DOI: 10.1080/0361526X.2015.1023690

To discover why and how librarians continue to have difficulty managing Open Access (OA) resources even as they become popular with the public and are embraced by the library community, the authors conducted a survey of librarians’ experiences with them and after analysis of the stated problems and workflows in the survey, created a list of recommendations.  This article is a summary of the program session at which they reported their findings.  80% of the 150 respondents to the survey worked at institutions “supporting intensive scholarship at the Master’s level or greater” (80), but large and small institutions were almost equally represented.  Several electronic resource management systems were represented in survey answers, as was a variety of link resolvers and discovery services, including “none”.  According to the survey respondents, having to use many tools to deal with OA’s creates a lot of challenges. 

The first issue examined with OA resources was the existence of hybrid OA, that is, resources where some but not all of the articles are openly accessible.  This method of OA presents so many difficulties with finding and accessing available articles only 10% of the libraries surveyed offered these resources at all.  A possible solution to the problem of findability is article-level metadata on accessibility rather than title-level in order to differentiate between open and closed articles within the same title.  NISO has apparently issued guidelines for such a metadata standard, but it has been poorly communicated to the library and publishing communities at large, and thus has not been implemented. 

Respondents also indicated inconsistent metadata was one of their biggest and most widespread challenges in managing OA, saying lines of communication “upstream” to publishers for feedback need to be more open, and stricter metadata standards would make discovery of OA resources easier.  OA content also is subject to inconsistent branding and semiotics indicating its openness for both discovery and access.  In addition, publishers do not clearly communicate the use rights attached to OA content.  Overall, the authors concluded librarians most want consistency and clear communication throughout the entire “serials supply chain” to land in full interoperability with regards to Open Access content.  Consistent metadata is useless without it also being correct, and both survey respondents and session attendees complained of inaccurate information about OA resources hindering their discovery and use of items.

A general lack of clarity in the role of OA resources in the library also posed a problem to survey respondents.  Partially this is due to the difficulty of fitting OA resources into the general acquisitions and cataloging workflows, as well as a lack of collection development guidelines relating to OA resources and guidelines for integrating them into the larger collection.  While OA resources are a helpful supplement to a paid-for collection, they cannot completely replace resources that cost money, nor have they yet solved the serials pricing crisis.  Overall, the return on investment on OA resources is considered mixed, given the problems they present.

Evaluation

I had been wondering how and how well Open Access resources could be integrated into a general library collection, so I was happy to find this overview of some of the issues.  As it is the summary of a program session presenting the results of the survey, I feel like this article is too removed from the primary source to be of use as anything other than an overview.  However, it’s a good introduction/supplement to looking over the actual survey results.  I also thought having the session attendees’ reactions and thoughts included was valuable, providing a different perspective on the data and some useful anecdotes.  I’d like to see a transcript of the session to see all of the mentioned brainstorming that went on in the Q&A.  I think OA is or soon will be the next big issue in serials acquisitions and management as well as in reference and cataloging.