Open Access: a role for the Aggregators

[Heather Morrison <heatherm@eln.bc.ca>]

Vendors of aggregated databases and similar services to libraries 
have potentially very important roles to play in the transition 
to open access.

These roles range from increasing visibility of open access 
journals through providing abstracting and indexing, to 
supporting OA services such as the Directory of Open Access 
Journals, to contributing to the economics of open access and 
including the full text content of OA journals in the aggregated 
databases.

This could be a win-win-win situation.  OA journals benefit from 
enhanced impact and support; vendors can provide expanded 
services at little or no additional cost; and libraries can enjoy 
more fulltext content in the well-developed searching services we 
currently enjoy.

By my calculations, libraries could fund an immense amount of 
open access journals, at costs of an average of $1 - $10 per 
title.

For details, please see my blogpost, Open Access:  Roles for the 
Aggregators: 
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com/2008/03/open-access-roles-for- 
aggregators.html

Any opinion expressed in this e-mail is that of the author alone, 
and does not represent the opinion or policy of BC Electronic 
Library Network or Simon Fraser University Library.

Heather Morrison, MLIS
The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com