Open Access Journals

Open access publications can be viewed as a partial way to ease library serial budget woes. There are many high quality open access publications, but predatory open-access publishers present a continuing issue. Predatory open access journals are defined as journals that exist for the sole purpose of profit. They can misrepresent their review process/board, location and/or affiliations.

Jeffery Beall, a librarian at the University of Colorado-Denver, maintains a blacklist of predatory publishers ("Beall's List").  The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) maintains a "white-list" of OA journals meeting base line criteria, such as being chiefly scholarly, providing quality control through an editor, editorial board or peer review, and having a registered ISSN. Another organization maintaining a white-list is the Open Access Scholarly Publisher's Association. Publishers must apply and pledge to adhere to a code of conduct to become members.

As librarians, we can take an advisory role, assisting our patrons as they navigate the OA landscape.

The following articles provide a more detailed, but still quick, overview of the issues surrounding OA publishing.


Berger, Monica and Cirasella, Jill, Beyond Beall's list: better understanding predatory publishers. College and research libraries news 76, no. 3 (March 2015)

Directory of Open Access Journals introduces new standards to help community address quality concerns. SPARC blog, March 5, 2015

Heller, Margaret, Educating your campus about predatory publishers. ACRL TechConnect, April 13, 2013

Linked Data URIs and Libraries: The Story So Far

The linked data movement is a relatively new trend on the web that, among other things, enables diverse data providers to publish their content in an interoperable, machine-understandable way. Libraries around the world appear to be embracing linked data technologies that render their content more accessible to both humans and computers. This paper focuses on linked data URIs that refer to authority data.  The specific MARC fields that are capable of hosting linked data information are identified. Additionally, seven major national libraries are examined to determine to what degree they have adopted the fundamental linked data principles.

From  http://www.dlib.org/dlib/may15/papadakis/05papadakis.html
D-Lib Magazine, May/June 2015

Fans of the RDA Toolkit index, rejoice!

There's good news for those who were dismayed at the removal of the index in the latest update of the RDA Toolkit. It was announced today on the RDA Toolkit blog (http://www.rdatoolkit.org/blog/7768) that the RDA print index has been reinstated! As stated in the blog post:

"In the weeks that followed the April 14 release to RDA Toolkit, we heard from a number of users who were unhappy about the removal of the index from the Toolkit. In response to that feedback, we have added a PDF of the RDA Print index to the Tools tab of RDA Toolkit. This PDF file contains the index that will be part of the 2015 revision of RDA in print. The index has been revised and updated to reflect the changes to the RDA standard that were made since the April 2014 release and through the April 2015 release. The PDF is not hyperlinked, but it is downloadable and may be printed for personal use."