5th READING ASSIGNMENT

Title : The Open Access Initiative: a new paradigm for scholarly communications.

Author: Kristin Ylotis.

Source Citation: Ylotis, Information Technology and Libraries 24.4 (Dec 2005): 157(6). InfoTrac Custom Periodicals 100. Gale. Manuel S. Enverga University Foundation. 4 Aug. 2009 .


ABSTRACT:

This paper gives an account of the origin and development of the Open Access Initiative (OAI) and the digital technology that enables its existence. The researcher explains the crisis in scholarly communications and how open access (OA) can reform the present system. OA has evolved two systems for delivering research articles: OA archives or repositories and OA journals. They differ in that OA journals conduct peer review and OA archives do not. Discussion focuses on how these two delivery systems work, including such topics as OAI, local institutional repositories, E-prints self-archiving software, cross-archives searching, metadata harvesting, and the individuals who invented OA and organizations that support it.
The scholarly communications crisis has become a major concern in the academic and research community. Libraries across the board are undergoing significant budget shortfalls caused by increases in the numbers and costs of peer-reviewed journals. At issue is commercial publishers' policy of turning scholarly research into a commodity and raising subscription rates to levels that cannot be absorbed by library budgets. This has the effect of keeping professional publications out of the reach of users. A worldwide effort is underway to address this scholarly communications crisis. A new paradigm has emerged that will realign scholarly journals to their traditional role of free information created for the public good. This paper explores the origins and development of the Open Access Initiative (OAI), which enables a more socially responsible and equitable way of disseminating scholarly communications.

THREE (3) THINGS I LEARNED:

1. Open Access (OA) signifies the democratization of knowledge and supports a socially responsible way to distribute knowledge.
2. Open Access (OA) makes the same knowledge and information available to scholars in wealthy, first- world nations, in developing ex- communist, second –world nations, and in underdeveloped third- world nations.
3. Open Access (OA) archives and journals are evidence that the world is moving in the direction of democratization of information and knowledge by removing access restrictions in the form of copyright protection of free- based dissemination policies.



IMPLICATIONS:

Open Access means removing barriers to research, wherein the serials pricing and permission crises can be solved because it is free of charge to users and it is because the copyright holders consent in advance to unrestricted reading, downloading, copying, sharing, storing, printing, searching, linking and crawling of OA articles. It only means that if the scholars retain copyright to their work, then they consent to give the users Open Access to research articles for which they expect no payment. If scholar transfers the copyright to the traditional publisher, then the publisher will erect price and permission barriers to prevent Open Access.

Subscriptions of print and non- print journals now a day is so expensive. As a Periodicals Librarian, I can say that Open Access Journals helps a lot to improve our services in my section. Aside from our print journals and e- journals subscription, we can also give them some URL of Open Access Journals for the additional resources.