Open Access: What You Need to Know

Citation

Casserly, M.F. (2013), "Open Access: What You Need to Know", Collection Building, Vol. 32 No. 2, pp. 74-74. https://doi.org/10.1108/01604951311322066

This ALA Editions Special Report by Walt Crawford is a short (only 70 pages of text), information‐packed primer on open access (OA). The author, who has published more than 500 articles on a wide variety of topics in librarianship and who is currently the author, editor and publisher of the e‐journal Cites & Insights, addresses the library practitioner in a chatty but clear and concise style.

The report consists of six chapters that cover the OA landscape from definitions of OA to issues surrounding it and actions that librarians can take to promote OA. In the first chapter the author provides a very simple definition of OA and reviews the reasons why this movement is important to librarians working in all types of libraries. He also presents a brief review of scholarly journal publishing at the end of the chapter, a section that might be needed earlier by those who are unfamiliar with OA and the scholarly communication process. In Chapter 2 the author presents the more detailed and varied definitions of OA (including Green, Gold Gratis and Libre OA) and the history of the OA movement. In the third and fourth chapters he covers the issues that make OA difficult to achieve and the various controversies, those that are legitimate as well as the “myths, misunderstandings, and straw men” that surround OA. He then urges librarians, particularly those in academic and research libraries, to think about OA's Five Basics: understanding it, communicating about it, encouraging access to OA works, making works they author OA, and keeping their knowledge about OA current. He also describes the work that librarians need to do with the scholars and researchers in their institutions and briefly touches on institutional repositories, publishing OA journals and contributing to the research on OA.

The author concludes this report with a selective, annotated bibliography of sources that library practitioners can use to keep up with OA developments. The author summarizes views held by various OA experts, especially Peter Suber, throughout the text. All experts are referenced, and the author provides URLs within the text for many of the works he describes and discusses. This is a book that will become dated quickly, as the OA movement is still evolving. However, it is a handy – albeit pricy at $45.00 for the print version – well‐written resource for the present.