RE: Librarians, Publishing Behavior, & Open Access

["Sloan, Bernie" <bernies@uillinois.edu>]

Jill Emery said:

"...in relation to open access publication, the one area where we, as a
profession, have been most vocal, we have also been most hypocritical. How
many library and information science journals are truly open access?"

I've wondered about this myself in the past. If you look at ALA
publications, it's kind of a mixed bag. American Libraries has links to
maybe 40 articles published over the past seven years. College and
Research Libraries offers all of its articles online, but access is
limited to ACRL members. Library Administration & Management appears to
offer only its tables of contents online. Reference and User Services
Quarterly appears to offer just abstracts. Information Technology and
Libraries looks like it has somewhere near half of its articles openly
available, but there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason as far as
which articles are available and which aren't.

For an interesting and ironic contrast, take a look at Library Journal. To
the best of my knowledge, all of LJ's feature articles are openly
available. Interesting that a for-profit would do this, but not a
not-for-profit professional association. Is this common, i.e., a
for-profit in a given field making its articles freely available while a
professional association/society in the same field does not?

Bernie Sloan