Cataloging Open Access Journals

[Connie Roberts <croberts@hamilton.edu>]

On a practical note, I don't believe that anyone has mentioned that the
BioMed Central titles have records in OCLC, almost all entered by the
Library of Congress, so they should be in RLN as well.  We added the BMC
open access titles to our Serials Solutions list months ago and are in the
process of adding them to the catalog.

Re an early message in the thread, I don't think the reason that open
access journals are often overlooked is the lack of a physical piece to
receive, rather it's the lack of an invoice to pay.  We do most of our
e-journal cataloging (using the one record approach whenever possible)
from lists prepared by acquisitions.

If we're going to support open access publishing, someone in the library
needs to be an advocate for including quality open access titles in the
catalog, e-journal list, citation linking software, etc. My guess is that
open access titles from respected sites won't be any more volatile than
paid e-journals - they may be less volatile when you consider some of the
e-journal packages we deal with.

Connie Roberts
Director of Technical Services
Hamilton College