Academic Libraries and Open Access Strategies

Abstract

Right click to open a feedback form in a new tab to let us know how this document benefits you. ABSTRACTWith the rise of alternate discovery services, such as Google Scholar, in conjunction with the increase in open access content, researchers have the option to bypass academic libraries when they search for and retrieve scholarly information. This state of affairs implies that academic libraries exist in competition with these alternate services and with the patrons who use them, and as a result, may be disintermediated from the scholarly information seeking and retrieval process. Drawing from decision and game theory, bounded rationality, information seeking theory, citation theory, and social computing theory, this study investigates how academic librarians are responding as competitors to changing scholarly information seeking and collecting practices. Bibliographic data was collected in 2010 from a systematic random sample of references on CiteULike.org and analyzed with three years of bibliometric data collected from Google Scholar. Findings suggest that although scholars may choose to bypass libraries when they seek scholarly information, academic libraries continue to provide a majority of scholarly documentation needs through open access and institutional repositories. Overall, the results indicate that academic librarians are playing the scholarly communication game competitively.

The Collection development and Student’s Awareness of Library Resources for Research: Utilization of Print and Electronic Collection in KSAU-HS Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

“…Likewise, if academic libraries measure their value and receive their payoff by the quality, quantity, and use of their collections, then any time a researcher does not use the academic library in favor of some other route where he or she still acquires a payoff, then the academic library declines in value. In the whole game, it is important to know how the academic librarian responds to the researcher's complete information seeking strategy [5].…”