the changing landscape of serials
TRANSCRIPT
This article was downloaded by: [Lancaster University Library]On: 19 October 2014, At: 18:35Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,UK
The Serials Librarian: From thePrinted Page to the Digital AgePublication details, including instructions forauthors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/wser20
The Changing Landscape ofSerialsKrista Schmidt a & Nancy Newsome aa Hunter Library , Western Carolina University , USAPublished online: 17 Oct 2008.
To cite this article: Krista Schmidt & Nancy Newsome (2007) The Changing Landscapeof Serials, The Serials Librarian: From the Printed Page to the Digital Age, 52:1-2,119-133, DOI: 10.1300/J123v52n01_11
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1300/J123v52n01_11
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The Changing Landscape of Serials:Open Access Journals in the Public Catalog
Krista SchmidtNancy Newsome
Presenters
SUMMARY. In recent years, the open access movement has been gain-ing ground in the world of scholarly communication. One of the main ave-nues that open access utilizes is journals wherein access to articles isabsolutely free. We examine practical issues related to including open ac-cess journals in an academic library’s online catalog. Some of these in-clude the possible alleviation of budget constraints, providing more robustholdings, difficulties of maintaining titles, and indexing for access.doi:10.1300/J123v52n01_11 [Article copies available for a fee from The HaworthDocument Delivery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address: <[email protected]> Website: <http://www.HaworthPress.com>]
KEYWORDS. Open access, journals, public catalog, academic libraries
INTRODUCTION
About Us and Hunter Library
Hunter Library at Western Carolina University (WCU) is located inthe mountains of western North Carolina in the town of Cullowhee. The
© 2007 by the North American Serials Interest Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
[Haworth co-indexing entry note]: “The Changing Landscape of Serials: Open Access Journals in thePublic Catalog.” Schmidt, Krista, and Nancy Newsome. Co-published simultaneously in The Serials Librar-ian (The Haworth Information Press, an imprint of The Haworth Press, Inc.) Vol. 52, No. 1/2, 2007, pp. 119-133; and: Mile-High Views: Surveying the Serials Vista: NASIG 2006 (ed: Carol Ann Borchert, and Gary Ives)The Haworth Information Press, an imprint of The Haworth Press, Inc., 2007, pp. 119-133. Single or multiplecopies of this article are available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service [1-800-HAWORTH, 9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m. (EST). E-mail address: [email protected]].
Available online at http://ser.haworthpress.comdoi:10.1300/J123v52n01_11 119
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University, which is a Regional Comprehensive University, has ap-proximately 8,600 students in a variety of undergraduate and graduateprograms with the graduate programs mostly at the Masters degree-level. WCU is also a focused-growth institution; the University agreedto pursue aggressive enrollment growth (20% or more) and as a result,has been provided with special funding and support from the state ofNorth Carolina. Hunter Library is the sole library on campus and is partof a network of three western North Carolina university libraries, in-cluding the University of North Carolina at Asheville and AppalachianState University. This network is called the Western North Carolina Li-brary Network (WNCLN). Not only does WNCLN share materials via avan service (ABC Express), we also purchase materials as a network(including serials) and share a catalog. Thus, some decision-makinghappens as a network, not just as a single library.
We have been interested in Open Access (OA) for several years. Al-though Hunter Library benefits from focused-growth funds, we arekeenly aware that we still must be very careful with how we choose tospend funds, especially with skyrocketing prices for journals, particu-larly those in the STM world.
What We Are Not Talking About
This is not a debate about the merits of OA as it relates to the crisis inscholarly communication nor is it a discussion of which funding planwill be the most successful in supporting OA. We want to focus on thepractical, not necessarily the philosophical, aspects of OA journals.There is plenty to be found in the literature that addresses both of theseissues. Interestingly enough, there is not a lot of literature that truly fo-cuses on the more concrete side of OA effects on the library. That wasone of the things that really sparked our interest in addressing this issue:the lack of anyone really talking about how OA journals are already af-fecting workflow, etc., in an everyday situation. Finally, this discussiondoes not include Institutional Repositories although we recognize thatthey are an important aspect of OA itself.
What We Are Talking About
We are going to discuss the practical aspects of the addition of OpenAccess journals into a public catalog. These aspects are the types ofthings that can affect everyday workflow and also have a long term ef-fect. We will present what we have identified as the major issues related
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to adding OA journals by defining what those issues are, offering practi-cal ways to address those issues, and then talking about what we atHunter Library are doing or, as the case may be, not doing.
Definitions
Before beginning, we thought it would be a good idea to define someterms that are integral to this topic so that it would be clear what wemean when we refer to that term. We have defined seven terms that havea bearing on OA journals and the catalog. It is understood that differentpeople can provide different definitions for these topics and indeedsome definitions are debated quite heavily. The following definitionsare the way that we have chosen to define a specific term as it relates tothis topic.
Open Access: Free availability on the public Internet to a journal arti-cle, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print,search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing,pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose,without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those insepara-ble from gaining access to the Internet itself.1
Open Source: Open source software is software that includes sourcecode and is usually available at no charge. Additionally, open sourcesoftware must be freely redistributable; allow derivative works; andhave a license that does not discriminate against any persons or field ofendeavor.2 Example: Linux, Mozilla.
Open Standards: These are publicly available standards that anyonecan incorporate into their software. The standard is not owned by any-one; there are no fees to use the standard; there are no restrictions onwho can use it in their products; anyone can participate in their develop-ment and modification.3 Example: MARC record standard.
Open URL: A URL or Web address that contains bibliographic infor-mation about a citation, e.g., author, title, ISSN or ISBN, vol., issue,year, etc.4 Example: http://wncln.wncln.org:4550/resserv?genre=article&issn=1350-1925&title=Neurogastroenterology+%26+Motility&volume=18&issue=5&date=20061001&atitle=Suppression+of+nNOS+expression+in+rat+enteric+neurones+by+the+receptor+for+advanced+glycation+end-products.&spage=392&sid=EBSCO:aph&aulast=Korenaga.
Persistent Links and PURL: OCLC developed PURLs (PersistentUniform Resource Locator) to address the problem of changing URLs(Web addresses) and the broken links that result on Web pages. APURL/persistent link is designed to provide a permanent URL for a re-
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source, even if the resource’s own URL changes.5 Example: The PURLfor the journal History of Education (published by Taylor & Francis)is http://purl.oclc.org/net/drindod/historyoe and directs to http://taylorandfrancis.metapress.com/(jf0hjragzozbycjhsadkey55)/app/home/journal.asp?referrer=parent&backto=linkingpublicationresults,1:102450,1.
Link Resolver: A Link Resolver can read an OpenURL and check itagainst a database of the library’s holdings to see if the library holds orhas access to the resource. The resolver then displays to the userwhether the library has the resource and gives information on how ac-cess it (call number, URL to link to the e-resource, etc., or an alternativesuch as ILL in case the library does not have ready access to the re-source).6 Example: WebBridge, Serials Solutions’ Article Linker.
Metadata: Metadata refers to structured descriptions of discrete dataobjects (e.g., manuscript, an ashtray, a comic book), and the metadataitself is stored on a computer and usually displayed through a Webbrowser on the Internet. Metadata tags tell the machine or person that aparticular date is the date the object was created, that the name of a per-son is the name of the object’s creator, and so on. Another way to thinkof metadata is as constructed information developed by people for apurpose or a function.7 Example: Bib record in a catalog.
ALLEVIATING THE BUDGET CRUNCH
Why Is This Beneficial?
The so-called “serials crisis” has been around for years. Libraries havehad a difficult time managing the materials budget without compromis-ing all collections–monographs, media, and serials. Although WCU hasbeen somewhat immune to the North Carolina budget problems becausewe are a focused growth institution, we have had our share of cancellationprojects, cutting over 25% of our print subscriptions in 2001. Some pro-ponents of OA have tried to promote it as a way to relieve the pressure onbudgets, as more journal content becomes freely available. Putting OA ti-tles in our catalog for our users to access could theoretically accomplishthis. We think it remains to be seen and will explain why.
How Can This Be Accomplished?
A number of existing titles have become OA, but many of these haveembargoes, which will be addressed later. The number of journals“born” OA is growing but most of these have not been around long
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enough to have replaced any of the for-pay titles. According to the Li-brary Journal annual periodical price survey for 2005, “journal pricesare not dropping, librarians continue to study use data, correlate use toprice, cut non-essential journals . . . and publishers continue to laborover complicated pricing models for a way to maintain revenue.”8 Therecently published 2006 survey does not indicate any change to thatstatement.9 So far we are obviously not seeing any relief.
A lot will depend on the direction scholarly communication takes–ifand when authors and publishers embrace OA, only then will librariessee a significant relief in the materials budget. But will the materialsbudget then be reduced? In the meantime, OA is and remains a welcomecatalyst for change.
How Does Hunter Library Accomplish This?
At Hunter Library, the existence of OA has not had any impact on ourmaterials budget. However, their availability has meant an opportunityto offer a greater variety of titles and subject areas to our catalog, andalso more to maintain.
MAKING HOLDINGS MORE ROBUST
Why Is This Beneficial?
It allows collection in disciplines/areas that may not normally be therecipient of collection development focus such as new or small pro-grams. Additionally, we can pick and choose the most relevant titles asneeded. Another benefit, although perhaps more general, is that the pro-cess of subscribing, negotiation of a subscription deal, unsubscribing/canceling (for which a library can also be punished monetarily) isnegated.
Before continuing, the concept of Delayed Open Access (DOA) mustbe addressed. Delayed Open Access basically is a type of Open Accessthat allows traditional journals an opportunity to experiment with OpenAccess. Those who are a bit cynical also might view Delayed Open Ac-cess as a way for publishers in the traditional vein to appease patrons. Inthe strictest sense of the definition of Open Access, DOA is not trulyOpen Access since all of the contents are not immediately available forusers to print, redistribute, etc. The positive aspect of DOA journals isthat users get at least some access to journals that previously were not a
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part of our resources due to cost. However, embargo lengths can be soprohibitive that some titles may not be worth adding. This is especiallytrue for medical/health sciences or other disciplines that rely on the cur-rency of research. It also becomes difficult to explain to patrons why theycan only see certain years of the journal and not all of it. Some publishersalso offer only certain sections of the DOA journal for certain years asOpen Access. Examples of this can be seen at the “Free Online Full-textArticles” page at the HighWire Press Web site at http://highwire.stanford.edu/lists/freeart.dtl. The main question about DOA that arises is,“Does this falsely represent what the library can actually access?”
How Can This Be Accomplished?
We can select titles on an individual basis; subscribe to or includeaggregators or databases that include OA items; use link resolvers suchas SFX, CrossRef, Serials Solutions Article Linker10 that incorporate(or allow the USER to do so) open access items; or even develop ahomegrown product such as OhioLINK has done with their OLinks.11
There is a caveat when including aggregators that incorporate OAitems in their databases as well as to using link resolvers: in many caseslibraries must still take the initiative to incorporate it themselves or tellthe vendor to incorporate/track these OA items/collections. For exam-ple, in the article “Linking Users to Open Access,” Peter McCracken ofSerials Solutions is quoted as saying, “Any client can add any of thesedatabases to their profile and we’ll track these titles for them. It may bethat some libraries do not realize how many free collections we track, orare not familiar with some of these collections, and that’s why theyhaven’t asked us to track the collections for them.”12 Similarly, JennyWalker, vice president, marketing and business development, Informa-tion Services Division at Ex Libris, Inc., notes, “SFX KnowledgeBasehas details of nearly 4,000 free journals. The free journals can easily beidentified and activated as required.”13 How many of us are aware ofthis and are actually deciding to take advantage (or not) of tracking anOA collection?
How Does Hunter Library Accomplish This?
We activated our EBSCO A-Z product to include BioMed Central(BMC) and Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) titles. Since weuse EBSCO A-Z to populate WebBridge, our link resolver, we can nowlink to OA items easily. We have also added OA titles such as Beilstein
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Journal of Organic Chemistry to the catalog based on individual liaisonrecommendations. However, Hunter Library subject liaisons/bibliogra-phers are not as proactive as we should be about recommending OAtitles for addition.
FINDING TITLES
Why Is This an Issue?
This is a problem with journals in general; however, with the lack ofcommunication required between the publishers of OA journals andthose who add it as a resource, it becomes incrementally harder for li-braries to be aware of new OA journals. OA journals are, in general,lacking the whole marketing machine (ads, free issues) that is a part ofthe traditional publishing world.
OA journals are not all indexed in one place–despite dedicated data-bases such as the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Addition-ally, for some aggregators, the library must tell the aggregator to includethose OA packages in the download. Another thing to consider is thelifespan of an OA journal; are they more ephemeral? And if they aremore ephemeral or prone to change, does that potentially make themmore elusive when it comes to finding them?14
How Can This Be Addressed?
This can be accomplished by maintaining communication withaggregators in regards to their inclusion policies;15 using tools such asDOAJ or Google OA Resources Directory;16 browsing publisher/soci-ety broadcast e-mails for OA journal announcements; reading OA post-ings from subject-specific e-mail lists; scanning general or subject-specific news sources such as the news sections of Nature or Science;soliciting submissions from subject bibliographers or liaisons; and en-couraging suggestions from professors, instructors and patrons.
What Does Hunter Library Do?
We have become more active as far as looking at our aggregators orother providers to see what their policies are for including. It is actuallysomewhat difficult to find policy for some providers, so we have con-tacted our representatives to discuss their policies. We do all of the otherthings that are listed above such as looking at DOAJ and keeping track
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of general broadcasts regarding new OA journals via publisher e-mail,listserv, and news sources. The difficulty is we at Hunter Library havenot yet committed to doing this on a regular basis so coverage is spotty.
QUALITY
Why Is This an Issue?
It is a problem for traditional journals as well–in fact, in some ways itmay be a more important issue with traditional journals as subscribing isan ongoing long-term commitment17 involving rules, regulations andmoney. No one wants to waste valuable resources on a dud journal. So,why is quality such an issue with OA journals? Perhaps because theyare so new? Perhaps because barriers to start up are nil and “anyonecould do it?” It would make sense then, that OA journals–to some extentstill unknown, unproven entities–undergo more scrutiny.
One problem for OA journals is that traditional indicators of qualitymay be more difficult to discern. For example, OA journals do not nec-essarily have a publisher’s established reputation on which to rely.Also, the issue of editorial boards versus traditional peer review loomslarge in the Open Access debate. Quality may be perceived to be lessconsistent when using editorial boards instead of peer review and thereappears to be a common perception that OA publishing may lead to alack of peer-reviewed articles flooding the Internet.18
How Can This Be Addressed?
One of the best ways to address this is to create a clear list of criteriaby which to initially screen journals. It could include the following:
• Who is the publisher?• Who is on the editorial board and what are their credentials?• Who is the organizing/funding body (as a possible indicator of bias)?• What indexes include the title? Does it appear in standard indexing
tools?• What are the review guidelines? Peer reviewed or editorial board?• What is the number of overall submissions and acceptance rate?• What is the scope?• What does the content look like?• Do they include any usage statistics?• Has any citation analysis been done on the title?
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• Relevance?• Accuracy?• Interface?
What Does Hunter Library Do?
Hunter Library has a list of selection criteria that traditional journalsmust meet. OA titles should meet the same criteria. These criteria include:
• Relevance of the subject matter to the curriculum• Potential use of the work by students and faculty• Appropriateness for meeting the curriculum-related research needs
of faculty• Quality of scholarship or literary merit as determined by biblio-
graphic aids and review sources• Accuracy of information and data• Timeliness or permanence of the material• Reputation of the author or publisher• Quality of the physical product• Availability of other library materials on the subject• Availability of the same material in the WNCLN network• Inclusion of the work in important bibliographies and indexes• Language• Format (accessibility of the information)
These selection criteria can be easily used for those journals that areadded individually on a title-by-title basis. We can also use it whenevaluating a collection of OA journals that come as part of a packagefrom an aggregator. We cannot, due to time and staffing constraints, gothrough each journal that is part of an OA collection we receive viaaggregators to determine suitability. Rather we use the criteria to evalu-ate the OA collection as a whole and refuse the package if enough titlesdo not meet the quality criteria.
INDEXING FOR ACCESS/METADATA
Why Is This an Issue?
Having OA titles in a catalog does not mean users will now be able toreadily find them. The traditional method for accessing articles in jour-nals is via subject searches in indexes, then a lookup of the journal titleto verify it is owned and that the library holds the particular issue
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needed. Unless the indexing services we currently make available in-clude OA titles, our users will likely not find them.
How Can It Be Addressed?
We are beginning to see aggregators pick up OA titles, e.g., theEBSCOHost databases. Their inclusion policy mentions DOAJ andPubMed Central in particular.19 We need to stay aware of the inclusionpolicies for the services and products we use so that we can be sure thereis some way for our users to get to these titles. Where and if a title is in-dexed is a standard criteria for adding to our holdings. How many otherindexing services are including OA?
Another related issue is the use of metadata for harvesting articleswithin OA journals via Google and other metasearch engines. In thiscase, the catalog can be bypassed completely. Whether this is a goodthing or not is debatable, but for the purposes of our discussion, it begsthe question of whether it is worth it to have the titles in the catalog, es-pecially considering the maintenance required. While metadata can geta user from a search engine to an article, bypassing the catalog, the ac-tual metadata itself lacks the more robust content of a MARC record.Does this matter? Does this mean that there will be more search resultsto filter through before getting the most relevant article? On the otherhand, MARC records in our catalogs refer to the journal itself, not theindividual articles. This leads to the issue of whether or when we beginto catalog at the article level–which is not a part of this discussion!
A couple of examples:
• The BioMed Central title, Beilstein Journal of Organic Chemistry,began in 2005, is listed in UlrichsWeb, but the entry does not includeany indexing source. It is also in EBSCONet, with no pricing infor-mation, of course, but again no indexing listed. However, the homepage of the journal does state it is indexed by PubMed and CAS.
• A DOAJ title, Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, has beenaround a little longer (1999), is not listed in UlrichsWeb (as of April28, 2006), is in EBSCONet but offers no indexing information.
What Does Hunter Library Do?
If either of these were traditional print, we might select BeilsteinJournal of Organic Chemistry for purchasing, but probably not Journalfor Cultural and Religious Theory, even if at an affordable price, since
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we cannot verify indexing. Yet both are currently in our catalog. Howhelpful is it for our users that we have Journal for Cultural and Reli-gious Theory in our catalog? Are they finding it, or the better question,can they find it?
SUBJECT HEADINGS
One thing that we considered was the use of topical subject headingswhen adding open access journal titles to the catalog. Specifically,could topical Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) be used toidentify open access journals themselves, as well as their subjects? Wediscussed this idea with the head of cataloging at Hunter Library, TimCarstens.
Tim reported that subject headings, in general, have always beenproblematic for serials. The difficulty, according to cataloging conven-tion 20 is that subject headings should be as specific as possible whichdoes not do much for grouping them together in the larger sense. For ex-ample, “science” journals are not necessarily given a designation assimply “science–periodicals,” they are generally much more specificsuch as “Botany–periodicals,” or “Organometallic Chemistry–periodi-cals,” etc. And yet, often subject headings are not specific enough to beused for searching. CONSER guidelines state that catalogers should“assign topics that comprise a major part of the serial. If a specific por-tion is important, assign a heading to cover that portion provided that itconstitutes at least 20% of the serial.”21 This could easily preclude animportant, but small, topic from appearing as a subject heading. OpenAccess journals are no different from traditional journals in this way.They are assigned, by whoever does the original cataloging, topical sub-ject headings that best represent the main focus of the journal.
What we were really interested in knowing was “could LCSH beused to identify OA items in the catalog?” Just as an individual may beinterested in identifying all of the botany journals, someone may be in-terested in those journals that can be designated strictly as “Open Ac-cess.” “Open Access Publishing” is actually an LCSH used incataloging. The authority record notes that “Here are entered works onpublishing on the public Internet, allowing users to read, copy, distrib-ute, and print texts without copyright restrictions.”22 This means usethis subject heading for items addressing Open Access as a topic only,do NOT use it to designate items as Open Access themselves. From fur-
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ther talking to Tim, the basic understanding is that LCSH will not andprobably should not designate the acquisition type/method.
How can this be addressed? Other subject fields were suggested as analternative to the 650 field, where LCSHs are used. These mainly in-cluded use of a 655 or a 690 field which denote genre/form or a topicallocal subject added entry.23 Using a note field to identify journals asOpen Access was also considered as an alternative.
MAINTAINING TITLES
Why Is This an Issue?
Serials titles require constant maintenance–there are title changes,frequency changes, deaths, births, mergers, and splits. We have to bevigilant to keep up with these changes so that user access is not ham-pered. With print, the opportunity to catch changes occurs whenever anissue is received, or sometimes via notification from the publisher orvendor. With electronic resources of any kind there are fewer opportu-nities to discover changes, and with OA there are even fewer still sincethese titles do not require payment to access–there is not even an orderrecord in our ILS systems, but likely only a bibliographic record. Nopayment means less incentive for publishers to communicate with li-braries since library subscriptions are no longer their source of reve-nue.24 With OA (as with all e-resources) there are additional types ofchanges to watch for relating to stability in the form of changed plat-forms or interfaces, dead links, changes in embargo periods or holdingsin general, or, worst of all, title changes that are applied to all issues,even those previous to the time of the title change.
How Can This Be Addressed?
There are several options for handling changes. It is important toadopt some combination of these mechanisms to regularly check OA ti-tles in order to ensure the information in the catalog is up to date andaccurate.
• Link checkers–which will only catch certain types of problemswith links, e.g., dead links.
• The CONSER PURL project is an attempt to deal with this prob-lem. This project involves the use of PURLs for maintaining links
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for free serial e-resources, excluding government documents, lo-cated on an OCLC-hosted server.25
• OA titles could be flagged in some way so that they can easily bepulled into a report and checked periodically for changes. This is aserious staff/time issue and the benefits need to be consideredagainst the time and effort it will take to do this.
• The only truly automatic way to handle changes is the use of ser-vices such as Serials Solutions or EBSCO’s A-Z product whichwill update records for changes. According to EBSCO’S A-Z Webpage of FAQs, “EBSCO updates and maintains the links and otherdata for resources in our managed database.”26
What Does Hunter Library Do?
At Hunter Library most of our OA titles come in through EBSCO’sA-Z product using DOAJ as the source. These records are periodicallypurged and re-added, so any changes should be picked up on a fairlyregular basis. We questioned whether DOAJ itself keeps track of thechanges to the titles it includes. According to Lotte Jorgensen of DOAJ,the journal home pages are visited manually on a regular basis to checkthat the title still fulfills all their criteria and that it is still alive. Theyalso follow up on feedback from users who encounter problems.27 Aposting on the Liblicense discussion list of January 25, 2006, indicatedthat during the last 6 months of 2005, 50 titles were removed from theirdatabase as a result of these tracking methods.28 However, Sally Morrisof the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers,found a number of DOAJ titles (approx. 14%) either inaccessible, notoriginal journals, not fully OA, or no articles published since 2003.29
Practically speaking, it would seem that these are the kinds of thingsthat will be purged from DOAJ through the mechanism set up for thispurpose, but that given the nature of the beast, more will slip in fromtime to time. Thus, the question becomes, is this an acceptable rate ofproblematic titles? At any given time what percentage of print titles arein need of some kind of updating? We suggest probably about the same.So, realistically can we expect better from OA?
We have a few BioMed Central OA titles that are not part of theEBSCO A-Z download. These are not flagged in any way so they arenot part of any updating done via the A-Z purge and re-load. TheWNCLN Collections Committee has agreed to add the BioMed Centraltitles to the A-Z download, so in the future these will be updated regu-larly. This will enrich our holdings and cause these titles to be included
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in the updating. But there are still other “rogue” titles in the catalog thatare not subject to any kind of updating, meaning our catalog containssome clutter that may or may not be cleaned up at some point.
NOW WHAT OR IS IT WORTH IT?
We have discussed a number of issues related to adding OA journalsto our catalogs, some positive and some not so positive. On the positive,this has the potential to give us a break with our materials budgets in fu-ture and gives us the opportunity to make our holdings more robust at nocost to our serials budget. On the other hand, there are serious questionsrelating to finding titles to add, quality of content and interface, index-ing and other finding aids, and maintenance. The question for us atHunter Library is, is it worth it? We think it is. Adding OA journals tothe catalog allows us to include a wide variety of journals that would notbe affordable otherwise. As with all electronic journals, paid or notpaid, we will continue to work through the logistics of maintenance inorder to find the most efficient process.
NOTES
1. Open Society Institute, “Budapest Open Access Initiative,” Budapest Open Ac-cess Initiative. http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml.
2. Edward M. Corrado, “The Importance of Open Access, Open Source, and OpenStandards for Libraries,” Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship. 42 (Spring2005). Available online at http://www.istl.org/05-spring/article2.html
3. Karen Coyle, “Open Source, Open Standards,” Information Technology and Li-braries. 21 no. 1 (March 2002): 33-37.
4. Brian Sealy (Cataloging & Metadata Management Librarian, Hunter Library,Western Carolina University), in discussion with Krista Schmidt, April 2006.
5. OCLC Research, “PURLS,” Persistent URL Home Page. http://purl.oclc.org/;Sealy, discussion.
6. Sealy, discussion.7. Sealy, discussion; Karen Coyle, “Understanding Metadata and Its Purpose,”
Journal of Academic Librarianship. 31 no. 2 (March 2005): 160-163.8. Lee C. Van Orsdel and Kathleen Born, “Choosing Sides,” Library Journal. 130
no. 7 (April 15, 2005): 44.9. Lee C. Van Orsdel and Kathleen Born, “Journals in the Time of Google,” Li-
brary Journal. 131 no. 7 (April 15, 2006): 39-44.10. Jill E. Grogg, “Linking Users to Open Access,” Searcher. 13 no. 4 (April 2005):
52-56. http://0-search.epnet.com.wncln.wncln.org:80/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&an=16766235.
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11. Ibid.12. Ibid.13. Ibid.14. Sally Morris, “When Is a Journal Not a Journal? A Closer Look at the DOAJ,”
Learned Publishing. 19 no. 1 (January 2006): 73-76.15. Krista Schmidt, Pongracz Sennyey, and Tim Carstens, “New Roles for a Chang-
ing Environment: Implications of Open Access for Libraries,” College & Research Li-braries. 31 no. 5 (September 2005): 410.
16. Ibid., 411.17. Dora Chiou-Sen Chen, Serials Management: A Practical Guide. (Chicago:
American Library Association, 1995), 41.18. Sara Schroter, Leanne Tite, and Richard Smith, “Perceptions of Open Access
Publishing: Interviews with Journal Authors,” British Medical Journal. 330 no. 7494(April 2005): 757.
19. EBSCO Support, “Can EBSCOhost Provide Links to Open Access Publishersand Services Such as BioMed Central and PubMed Central?” http://support.ebsco.com/knowledge_base/detail.php?id=2018.
20. Timothy V. Carstens (Head of Cataloging/Acquisitions, Hunter Library, West-ern Carolina University), in discussion with Nancy Newsome and Krista Schmidt,April, 2006 and John Reimer, “Module 15: Subject Headings.” In CONSER Catalog-ing Manual, edited by Jean Hirons. (Washington: Library of Congress, 2002).
21. Reimer, “Module 15.”22. OCLC Subject Authority File. “Open Access Publishing,” http://www.oclc.org/
connexion.23. OCLC, Bibliographic Formats and Standards, 3rd ed. (Dublin, OH: OCLC,
2002).24. Schmidt, Sennyey, and Carstens, “New Roles for a Changing Environment.”25. Valerie Bross, “The PCC/CONSER PURL Project: Improving Access to Free
Resources,” The Serials Librarian. 45, no.1 (2003): 19-26.26. EBSCO Information, “Open Access Titles from BioMed Central Now Accessi-
ble Through EBSCOhost® Electronic Journals Service,” news release, May 15, 2005,http://www.ebsco.com/home/whatsnew/bio_ehost.asp.
27. Lotte Jorgensen, e-mail message to Nancy Newsome, April 10, 2006.28. Lotte Jorgensen, e-mail to Liblicense-l discussion list, January 25, 2006, http://
www.library.yale.edu/~llicense/index.shtml.29. Morris, “When Is a Journal Not a Journal?” 76.
CONTRIBUTORS’ NOTES
Krista Schmidt is Reference Librarian/Science Liaison at Hunter Library, WesternCarolina University. Nancy Newsome is the Head of Collection Development and Se-rials at Hunter Library, Western Carolina University.
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