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We the undersigned universities recognize the crucial value of the services provided by scholarly publishers, the desirability of open access to the scholarly literature, and the need for a stable source of funding for publishers who choose to provide open access to their journals’ contents. Those universities and funding agencies receiving the benefits of publisher services should recognize their collective and individual responsibility for that funding, and this recognition should be ongoing and public so that publishers can rely on it as a condition for their continuing operation.

We believe that institutions (and the sub-institutional units that manage collection funds) should be open to exploring alternative funding models for scholarly communication. Institutions should highly value funding models that promote universal access to their research output.

Scholarly open access (OA), one of CLA’s information policy advocacy areas, has reached critical momentum in Canada. New initiatives are being announced regularly in all areas of the open access movement, including OA publishing, repositories and mandates. Established projects are becoming regularized and growing. Most of these initiatives are library-based or are connected to libraries in some way.

I concluded that after spending a year on writing a public document, only to make it as inaccessible as possible, was antithetical to the purpose it was intended to fulfill. Indeed, consigning to lock up a dissertation on open access seemed inconsistent, if not downright hypocritical. And lastly, I have yet to find a publisher who has a hard policy against accepting a manuscript that was derived from a graduate thesis. While most serious journals have statements about only accepting original material, filing a dissertation does not seem to constitute “prior publication,” or at least none are willing to state this.

Librarians keep a lot of statistics and measure a lot of things. Gate count, reference transactions, instruction sessions, website hits, visits to a specific tutorial or research guide, e-resource usage, etc. We are big on numbers. I have no problem whatsoever with measuring things like this and in many cases I think it’s essential. The thing I do have a problem with are the unsupported interpretations we often make based on these numbers and the direction they’re going in.

Open Access (OA) Institutional Repository (IR) managers need to remind themselves that their mandate is to see to it that their IRs are filled with OA’s target content (peer-reviewed research journal articles) so as to maximize the accessibility, visibility, usage and impact of their institution’s research output. Their mandate is not to seek or provide alternative “business models” for journal publishing.

The American Folklore Society (AFS) and the Indiana University Bloomington Libraries are creating a prototype of a new scholarly resource called Open Folklore. The vision for this open-access online portal for folklore studies is to make a greater number and variety of useful resources, both published and unpublished, available for the field of folklore studies and the communities with which folklore scholars partner.

Open access (OA) publishing models, pricing concerns, and the cannibalization of print sales were the headline topics at the SPARC-ACRL forum session on Saturday at the ALA 2010 Midwinter Meeting in Boston, titled “The Ebook Transition: Collaboration and Innovations Behind Open Access Monographs.” The conclusion? Open access monographs are an unprecedented boon to the scholarly mission of dissemination, yet challenge the financial sustainability of an academic press.

Data-about-data is now used to track materials, assess needs, compare collections, inform research, manage workflows, plan budgets and even make friends. Catalogers have been joined by publishers, retail outlets, shipping companies, researchers, faculty, Web programmers, search engine optimizers and end users in the flow of metadata creation and modification. This puts libraries, and catalogers, right in the middle of a revolution in how we think about representing and describing information. And the more partners we can involve in these processes, the more chances libraries have to add value up and down a variety of data supply chains.

Open access urges scholars to self-archive, that is, to include their work in an online archive or repository accessible to all. Today there are 1,764 institutional and subject archives or repositories, including U of T’s T-Space, listed in the Registry of Open Access Repositories. The contents are discoverable through Google and an argument for self-archiving is that it makes your work available to the global community.