Melody's Blog

This sounds pretty high-falutin':  "In accordance with Section 103(b)(6) of the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010 (ACRA; Pub. L. 111-358), this Request forInformation (RFI) offers the opportunity for interested individuals and organizations to provide recommendations on approaches for ensuring long-term stewardship and broad public access to the peer-reviewed scholarly publications that result from federally funded scientific research. The public input provided through this Notice will inform deliberations of the National Science and Technology Council's Task Force on Public Access to Scholarly Publications." However, this is something all Americans, especially taxpayers , should care about. Notice that individuals are asked to provide input to the government. How often does that happen? This is of great importance to families and individuals who suffer from rare diseases anddisorders . The research that can be aggregated because of open access h...

Really interesting post Sunday on The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics which I recommend to all librarians and teaching faculty--especially my faculty colleagues who so patiently listened to me and asked terrific questions at last months faculty seminar. The question is how do you assess new open access journals. I answered this at faculty seminar, but this blog post does so more thoroughly and eloquently than I did! Just as said though, very important--who are the journals editors, board of advisors; would you allow your name to be used if you didn't think the journal promoted the kind of quality you desire in an academic publication. This article should definitely be read by all faculty serving on tenure and promotion committees. YES, open access journals can be just as scholarly as those that are not open access. In my presentation I mentioned Sopher Press--if you are a theological librarian colleague and do not know about these journals, you must take a look. Take a look ...

Next week is Open Access Week . Better sign up now. More education is needed so badly. I had a discussion with an editor of two journals last week and every time I mentioned open access he immediately went to the gold model ( see news of gold model in today's IHE ) which is not necessary for humanities journals. Who gives these people there information? Why don't they know about models which are much more suitable for the types of journals that theological schools subscribe to? Why did I have to find out today that yet another journal I subscribe to has gone up 300Euros? That is one more cancellation. I hope more of you will sign up to follow Open Access Week!

Barbara Fister has a great post   on why libraries are sometimes loath to embrace open access; why they keep deepening the hole by continuing to go for Big Deals in periodical subscriptions. I am starting this blog because I want to keep preaching the gospel of open access, but I also think there are other sustainable models. I attended the JSTOR/Portico Forum this past Tuesday and I am really excited by the possibilities which seem to be coming along with JSTOR. With the Current Scholarship Program , a library will be able to purchase one (1) title. It seems likely that by purchasing that one title, the library will gain search capability of the entire JSTOR archive--delivering lots of discoverability to their users. I am sold on the JSTOR collections as a way to gain access to multi-and interdisciplinary journals (and other material) and have no plans to discontinue any collections, but the ability to add specific journals in addition to the collections is an awesome idea. Theolo...