RE: Open access and the ALA

["Smith, Becky" <becky@uiuc.edu>]

Samuel and other Colleagues:
 
Joseph Zumalt, Yoo-Seong Song and I have an article published in RUSQ in
the Winter 2003 issue; it came out 2 weeks ago.  We were given the choice
of ALA having exclusive rights or the other option of retaining copyright
ourselves.  The latter looked as though it would not be carried by any
indexing, but we were assured this would not be the case after some
inquries with the editors.  We noticed that RUSQ offered other authors
last year her/his own copyright which is why we chose to get our own, and
agreed to give permission granted for nonprofit, educational use.  
Because ALA doesn't pay for articles submitted, we didn't mind this clause
at all.
 
I might add that ALA Editions offers sharing of copyright between the
organization and the authors.
 
In terms how much is online, RUSQ and other related is available through
Library Lit or other means.  I happen to work at an institution whereby
quite a few of our customers are students enrolled (as well as faculty) in
library and information science and/or have professors in related
disciplines, so Lib Lit is a must here.
 
Haworth, another dominant publisher of library and other business-related
literature, offers e-journal access, yet none of their publications do not
have any impact at all in ISI, which is a sore point with some of us here.  
If open access means little or no impact in ISI, then there is an
opportunity as a profession (or another scientific scholarly organization)
to create its own impact index, which is what I believe Jean Claude
Guédon of the University of Montreal has suggested.  What a concept!
 
Best wishes,
Becky Smith
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
becky@uiuc.edu