RE: Usage of Open Access articles

["Margaret Landesman" <margaret.landesman@library.utah.edu>]

Re. Why OA articles may be accessed and read more (even by users with
access to a subscribing ibrary); I wanted to suggest an additional and
more mundane reason. They require no infrastructure on the user end - so
they almost always work.

They work when the proxy server is screwy or down or the user doesn't know
about it or forgot their password.  They work when the library messed up
or forgot to put all the necessary links in.  They work when something
somewhere along the line gets broken or changes and the journals person or
the electronic resource person or the cataloger or the systems person are
out of town or busy with more urgent problems than fixing the link to a
single journal. You just don;t find OA journals lingering on "to-do"
lists.

Getting them into the catalog and the e-journal list was a problem at
first, but Lund;s DOAJ fixed that.

When the user is coming from a posting on a discussion list -- a route I
use a lot myself, they are one click.  Non-OA articles are not.  I am lazy
- I find myself more likely to take a look at a citation of middling
interest if it's OA.  I am also more likely to follow a citation from an
electronic book or journal (itself OA or not), if all I have to do is
click on it.

It is true that we are working hard on this problem and, at least from
library point of view, getting better and better at creating a seamless
information-place for our users.  But we are a long ways from matching the
reliability and simplicity that OA journals inherently offer.

Margaret Landesman
Head, Collection Development
University of Utah