260 Reading Assignment : Open Access Online Journals for Libraries

Linking Users to Open Access / Grogg, Jill E.

Jill E Grogg. (2005, April). Linking Users to Open Access. Searcher, 13(4), 52-56. Retrieved August 13, 2011, from ProQuest Computing. (Document ID: 821739421).

Abstract

To date, Open Access (OA) is one of the dynamic issues confronting the information professionals.  With emergence of OA numerous amount of information which are open for access to information seekers are now available.  OA, being ubiquitous, challenges the information professionals, including the librarians, as they struggle to find how best to link their users to this new wealth of information.

Three Things I Learned from the Article

1. The two primary vehicles for delivering OA to research articles are OA journals and OA archives or repositories.  The main difference between the two is that OA journals conduct peer review while the OA archives do not.  Some other vehicles of OA are personal websites, e-books, listservs, discussion forums, blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, and other P2P file-sharing networks.

2. According to Stevan Harnad, librarians should accordingly point their patrons to the official copy of the article for scholarly research and for sole purpose  of access, open access version of the article can be accessed. 

3. Librarians themselves can make link to OA materials for their patrons.  In addition, to provide practical access to OA materials, it requires cooperation with  myriad groups (like link resolver).  Search tools are also good linkers of OA materials and Google is the most ubiquitous of these search engines.

Application / Implication of what I've learned to my work/to me as a person

Google is the most consulted search engine for open sources materials.  As a student, I often consulted Google to access free scholarly materials until I was made aware of various open access databases from the UP Main Library webpage.  For scholarly works, I still prefer to use of printed materials over electronic ones. In my experience in using open access databases in the UP Library page, I can't seem to find appropriate materials for my needs which , if I may say, may be attributed to the poor IR system of said databases.  Until OA sources be organized using a reliable IR system, I may start considering most OA materials in scholarly research.