Open Access – Library Technology Launchpad

Library Technology at the ALA 2019 Annual Conference

The ALA 2019 Annual Conference is just days away. The conference covers a myriad of library topics and sorting through the program sessions to find the ones focused on library technology takes effort. Let us do the work for you.

Here is our list of programs related to library technology. You’ll find interest groups and sessions on data and metadata, Linked Data, FOLIO, ILS and LMS, websites, mobile apps, NISO standards, UX, emerging technologies, and more. Committee meetings were not included. Sessions are located at the Washington Convention Center unless otherwise noted.

For official descriptions, speakers, and final schedule, please check the conference Full Schedule page.

6 Firefox Browser Extensions Every Librarian Needs

For users of Google Chrome, which has more than half of the browser market, we posted 6 Chrome Browser Extensions Every Librarian Needs and then 6 More Chrome Browser Extensions Every Librarian Needs. But there are many Mozilla Firefox users who prefer their browser or who have recently abandoned Google due to their recent questionable privacy decisions and political censorship.

Like Chrome, Firefox has a robust browser add-ons and extensions selection. Browser extensions are plugins or small applications that add functionality to your browser. Sometimes they work in the background (like Grammarly, below) but usually they work when you click on a small icon that gets added to the browser’s toolbar.

Mozilla has an add-ons website where you can find and install extensions, most of them are free.

Here are six Firefox browser extensions every librarian needs.

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Open Access Week 2017

Open Access Week

International Open Access Week runs from October 23–29, 2017. For all of the details, visit www.openaccessweek.org.

This year’s theme is “Open in order to:” with a blank line to highlight what open access enables your library or institution to do.

Open Access Week 2017

Open in order to:

Your library or institution is probably utilizing open access resources. For Open Access Week this year, promote them to show how they can benefit your users. Here are just a few of the ways.

Promote Institutional Repositories

Many institutions are publishing open access resources in institutional repositories, often administered by library staff. Whether using paid proprietary platforms such as bepress’s Digital Commons or open source products CONTENTdm, DSpace, and Omeka, institutions can publish open access scholarly articles, journals, books, and data.

Does your institution have an institutional repository? If so, promote it to your users—both creators and consumers. Show faculty and staff how they can extend the reach of their published research and increase citation counts. Teach users to find relevant open access resources written by their own professors and others in their field.

Also, help scholars extend their reach by helping them register for an ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID), a unique 16-digit number which distinguishes them from other researchers in online resources.

Extend Electronic Resources Budgets

We all subscribe to must-have research databases. But as subscription prices rise and library budgets are stretched thin, supplementing your list of paid databases with free, open access databases and journals makes sense. Important scholarly works are now being published exclusively in major open access databases such as arXiv, HathiTrust Digital Library, and PLOS ONE.

Increasingly, traditional publishers and database vendors are joining the trend of open access and providing some free content. Even if you don’t subscribe to their paid content, you can link to open access from publishers and databases.

Offer Free Textbooks and Other Educational Resources

Along with higher journal and database costs, students and libraries are faced with increasing costs of textbooks. Librarians have led the push towards expanding the use of open educational resources (OER). Encourage your faculty and staff to use open access textbooks when possible.

Learn More

Visit the Official Site

Visit the official Open Access Week website to see 2017 events and read their blogs to learn about what others are doing. Download resources & media such as posters, handouts, stickers, and logos to promote the event.

Follow on Social Media

Follow and use the Twitter hashtags #OAWeek and #OpenInOrderTo.

Past Open Access Weeks

Get more ideas from our previous Open Access Week 2016 and Open Access Week 2015 articles.

Open Access from Publishers and Databases

The movement toward open access databases and journals hasn’t been lost on traditional publishers and database vendors.

One problem for startup open access journals is their lack of reputation and prestige due to their inherent newness. They have no established reputation or credibility except that of the sponsoring organization: an academic society, institution, or university. Established traditional publishers can somewhat overcome this problem by lending their name, reputation, and credibility to their journals.

More and more traditional publishers are experimenting with the open access journal publishing model. Very few journals are converted from the traditional subscription model to open access, most are new journals developed as open access from the start.

Generally, the publishers are separating their open access journals from their subscription journals and creating new databases to aggregate and provide access to them. Database vendors may integrate subscription and open access journals with a search filter for open access titles.

Here are some major publishers and databases and their current open access offerings.

Elsevier

Giant academic publishing company Elsevier offers over 550 peer-reviews open access journals published under the gold open access model. In addition, Elsevier provides free access to archived material in more than 100 paid Elsevier journals.

See Elsevier Open Access Journals.

JSTOR

JSTOR JSTOR, a database of journals and ebooks, offers over 500 open access ebooks with no restrictions on chapter downloading or printing. Librarians can access free MARC records for these titles.

See about.jstor.org/open-access.

ProQuest

ProQuest doesn’t generally support open access. It does offer one service, called PQDT Open, providing open access dissertations and theses. Graduate students pay a one-time fee of $95 through the Open Access Publishing PLUS service.

See and search PQDT Open.

SAGE Open

SAGE Open is a peer-reviewed open access journal from SAGE Publications. Coverage spans “the full extent of the social and behavioral sciences and the humanities”. The publishing fee is $395.

See sgo.sagepub.com.

SpringerOpen

SpringerOpen contains “200+ peer-reviewed fully open access journals” and an interdisciplinary open access journal titled SpringerPlus. Most of the journals are indexed in Scopus and some SpringerOpen titles are searchable in Web of Science.

Authors pay “an article-processing charge (APC)” to get articles published in SpringerOpen.

See www.springeropen.com/journals.

Wiley Open Access

Wiley Open access offers 80+ open access journals. It is a subset of Wiley Online Library. Journal articles are accessible at PubMed Central.

Wiley also offers the partially-open access platform OnlineOpen with over 1,300 journals with a mix of pay and OA articles.

Wiley charges an Article Publication Charge (typically $800-$2,500) to authors or their institutions. Authors can choose the type of Creative Commons license to publish under.

See www.wileyopenaccess.com.

Library Technology at the ALA 2017 Annual Conference

The ALA 2017 Annual Conference is just one week away. The conference covers a myriad of library topics and sorting through the program sessions to find the ones focused on library technology takes effort. Let us do the work for you.

Here is our list of programs related to library technology. You’ll find interest groups and sessions on data and metadata, makerspaces, UX, Linked Data, ILS and LMS, websites, mobile apps, emerging technologies, and more. Committee meetings were not included.

For official descriptions, speakers, and final schedule, please check the conference Full Schedule page.
Continue reading “Library Technology at the ALA 2017 Annual Conference”