The Open Access Availability of Library and Information Science Literature

Abstract

To examine the open access availability of Library and Information Science (LIS) research, a study was conducted using Google Scholar to search for articles from 20 top LIS journals. The study examined whether Google Scholar was able to find any links to full text, if open access versions of the articles were available and where these articles were being hosted. The results showed that the archiving of articles is not a regular practice in the field; articles are not being deposited in institutional or subject repositories at a high rate; and, overall, the percentage of available open access articles in LIS was similar to the findings in previous studies. In addition, the study found that Google Scholar is an effective tool for finding known LIS articles.

A comparison of subscription and open access journals in construction management and related fields

“…These figures can be compared to 21 % for Information Systems research , 26 % for Library Information Systems (Way 2010) and 36 % for Business and Management (Lyons and Booth 2011).…”

Barriers to Open Access Publishing: Views from the Library Literature

“…Wilson's Library Literature and Information Science Index, a long time a key resource in LIS [27,28]. Previous studies that examined open access in the LIS literature also used subject databases to collect data, but they extracted articles from smaller databases, such as LISA or broader indexes, such as Social Sciences Citation Index [16,25,26,29].…”

“…The majority use descriptive statistics or bibliometrics to examine publishing characteristics of LIS-related journal publications by analyzing entire journal title contents. Way [16] and Singh, Shah, and Gul [17] report on the availability and growth of open access journals among all of the LIS identified journals from Ulrichsweb: Global Serials Directory (Ulrichs). Many more studies analyze only open-access LIS-related journals by aggregating appropriate titles from periodical directories, e.g., Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), based on the LIS subject classification [3,[18][19][20][21][22].…”

How open is open access research in Library and Information Science?

“…The OA policies of these journals place the responsibility for ensuring OA solely in the hands of the authors, either through payment of the APC (to make their articles OA, that is, the hybrid model) or through self-archiving of post-print versions of their texts, which means the articles will only be available as OA if the authors take the initiative to self-archive or pay the article processing cost. Studies on the self-archiving levels of LIS researchers indicate that such archiving is not a regular practice in the field and that articles are not being deposited in institutional or subject repositories at a high rate (Björk 2012, Bowley and Vandegrift 2014, Mercer 2011). Way (2010 reported that only 27% of articles in that study were found to have selfarchived green versions.…”

“…LIS scholars and practitioners have been at the forefront of promoting OA, but previous studies show that the adoption of OA as a method of publication in LIS-related academic works (and research in general) has not been as high as expected (Bowley and Vandegrift 2014, Mercer 2011, Way 2010, Xia, Wilhoite & Myers 2011. The majority of studies investigated the general adoption of OA by LIS scholars and practitioners.…”