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Academic Libraries and Open Access Strategies C University of Kentucky UKnowledge Information Science Faculty Publications Information Science 2-2014 Academic Libraries and Open Access Strategies C. Sean Burns University of Kentucky, [email protected] Right click to open a feedback form in a new tab to let us know how this document benefits oy u. Follow this and additional works at: https://uknowledge.uky.edu/slis_facpub Part of the Scholarly Communication Commons Repository Citation Burns, C. Sean, "Academic Libraries and Open Access Strategies" (2014). Information Science Faculty Publications. 8. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/slis_facpub/8 This Book Chapter is brought to you for free and open access by the Information Science at UKnowledge. It has been accepted for inclusion in Information Science Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of UKnowledge. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Academic Libraries and Open Access Strategies Notes/Citation Information Published in D. Williams & J. Golden (Eds.), Advances in Library Administration and Organization, v. 32, p. 147-211. This article is (c) Emerald Group Publishing and permission has been granted for this version to appear here (http://uknowledge.uky.edu/slis_facpub/8/). Emerald does not grant permission for this article to be further copied/distributed or hosted elsewhere without the express permission from Emerald Group Publishing Limited. The document available for download is the author's post-peer-review final draft of the book chapter. Digital Object Identifier (DOI) http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/S0732-067120140000032003 This book chapter is available at UKnowledge: https://uknowledge.uky.edu/slis_facpub/8 ACADEMIC LIBRARIES AND OPEN ACCESS STRATEGIES C. Sean Burns ABSTRACT With the rise of alternate discovery services, such as Google Scholar, in conjunction with the increase in open access content, researchers have the option to bypass academic libraries when they search for and retrieve scholarly information. This state of affairs implies that academic libraries exist in competition with these alternate services and with the patrons who use them, and as a result, may be disintermediated from the scholarly information seeking and retrieval process. Drawing from decision and game theory, bounded rationality, information seeking theory, citation theory, and social computing theory, this study investigates how academic librarians are responding as competitors to changing scholarly information seeking and collecting practices. Bibliographic data was collected in 2010 from a systematic random sample of references on CiteULike.org and analyzed with three years of bibliometric data collected from Google Scholar. Findings suggest that although scholars may choose to bypass libraries when they seek scholarly information, academic libraries continue to provide a majority of scholarly documentation needs through open access and institutional repositories. Overall, the results indicate that academic librarians are playing the scholarly communication game competitively. Keywords: Open access; collection management; bibliometrics; decision and game theory; bounded rationality; principle of least effort INTRODUCTION In 2010, Ithaka S + R published the results of a 2009 survey which asked faculty about their scholarly communication behaviors and attitudes. The survey gives some credence to the following key observation: Basic scholarly information use practices have shifted rapidly in recent years, and as a result the academic library is increasingly being disintermediated from the discovery process, risking irrelevance in one of its core functional areas [Emphasis added] (Schonfeld & Housewright, 2010, p. 2). Contrary to recent studies that suggest increased usage of the academic library (e.g., Budd, 2009), the report suggests that researchers in the sciences, social sciences, and the humanities have moved away from the library building, the librarians, and the library’s catalog and databases and have moved toward general purpose search engines and other electronic resources to find and satisfy their document needs. Although search and discovery through electronic services include those to which the library subscribes, the report reveals, at the network level, the heavy use of nonlibrary electronic discovery services. For instance, searching with Google ranks third in the discovery process (∼ 70%), behind searching electronic, full text databases (∼ 90%), and following citations ( ∼ 90%), a process referred to as chaining (Ellis, Cox, & Hall, 1993). While only 8.6% out of 35,184 faculty who received the survey responded, and 1 although some have argued that the survey is based on incomplete premises (Nyquist, 2010), the findings warrant additional research about either the central or marginalized role academic libraries play in the work of today’s scholars. Thus, the Ithaka report informs the first research question: RQ 1. Is the current state of affairs, at the network level, such that nonlibrary electronic discovery services marginalize academic libraries? The state of affairs at the network level may encourage alternate paths to information, but open access content adds an additional problem for academic libraries. Broadly speaking, open access content is the content that is freely accessible to readers with means to the Internet. This is unlike other electronic, scholarly content behind subscription barriers, which requires both Internet and subscription access, such as through a library. Given that open access content is accessible outside a library’s collections, if researchers increasingly use nonlibrary electronic discovery services, then nonlibrary electronic discovery services plus the growing availability of open access content make it possible to bypass both the library’s services and electronic collections. Research about the influence and reach of open access content is growing. With its perceived importance for academic libraries, as a publishing model that librarians hope will counteract the growing and unsustainable costs of serials, such influence and reach require examination and inform the second research question: RQ 2. Does open access content, in conjunction with nonlibrary electronic discovery services, marginalize academic libraries? Framing these research questions in this way seems to suggest an argument against open access publishing, but that is neither the purpose nor the intent of this study. Rather, the objective of this study is to understand how trends in information seeking practices (e.g., searching for information outside the library with services such as Google and Google Scholar) in conjunction with the increasing availability of open access content (e.g., the ability to acquire a growing amount of quality information outside the library from open access entities such as PLOS ONE, PeerJ, and others) will change the fundamental notion of what an academic library is and will be in the 21st century. The unit of analysis in this study involves both the information seeking and information use practices of scholars and researchers (hereafter just researchers). In order to frame this study, we can think of information seeking as a type of decision making and of acquiring information as a type of payoff. Addressing these questions from this perspective allows us to draw from a framework built on a theory of decision making and competition, or more properly, decision and game theory. This becomes clear when we think of the whole scholarly game itself, where the practices of these researchers are placed in the context of the services and the content provided by academic librarians. That is, any time a researcher seeks information, the researcher engages in a series of decisions. Any time a researcher acquires a relevant and salient piece of information (such as a journal article), the researcher receives a payoff. Likewise, if academic libraries measure their value and receive their payoff by the quality, quantity, and use of their collections, then any time a researcher does not use the academic library in favor of some other route where he or she still acquires a payoff, then the academic library declines in value. In the whole game, it is important to know how the academic librarian responds to the researcher’s complete information seeking strategy. 2 The analysis in this study is based on a systematic random sample of bibliographic references collected by users of CiteULike, a social computing bibliographic reference management web site. Using these references’ bibliometric data, collected from Google Scholar, the objective is to identify where and how these users have collected their journal article references. Using logistic regression, the second objective is to determine what factors predict or explain open access availability. Finally, using Bayes’ theorem, the third objective is to build a hypothetical probability profile that illustrates the likelihood that a library’s collections have been used given the use of other documents that may be sourced at other locations, such as those held in subject or institutional repositories and which may be found through a service such as Google Scholar. This process allows a determination of whether using nonlibrary discovery services to retrieve open access or freely available content is a relevant alternative to using the library’s services to retrieve subscribed content. If the relevant alternative is viable, then the process allows for a determination to be made about the competitiveness of the alternative. Framing
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