Positioning Your Library in an Open-Access Environment

Abstract

This paper is a summary of the project that the author completed at Florida Gulf Coast Unviersity (FGCU) library for providing online access to 80 open access E-journals and digital collections. Although FGCU usesSerialsSolutions products to establish online access, any one can provide access to these collections as they are free for all. Paper includes a hyperlink to Google docs for a list of these collections and their URLs. Along with proper instructions and guidelines for setting up access, author also discusses the actual status of full text, copyright requirements, license issues, collection peculiarities and user interfaces of these collections.Recently, a study identified Florida Gulf Coast University (FGCU) library as an institution that holds machine-readable cataloging records for openaccess journals from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) in considerably higher numbers than the majority of U.S. academic libraries. Based on the dataset collected from the WolrdCat affiliated academic libraries, the study identified FGCU as an outlier institution and rightly so. We not only provide online access through our web site to 5,371 journals from the DOAJ, we provide access to more than 45,000 e-journals from 87 open-access collections created by various universities, Internet libraries, open-access initiatives of several universities, and government departments of the United States and many other countries all over the world.This article is a summary of a project that I completed at the FGCU library. The main purpose of this paper is to inform readers about 80 free journals and digital collections. Although I have used SerialsSolutions