François Renaville

SFX Miscellaneous Free Ejournals Target: Usage Survey among the SFX Community

The number of free or open access articles is increasing rapidly, and their retrieval with library indexes and OpenURL link resolvers has been a challenge. In June 2014, the SFX MISCELLANEOUS_FREE_EJOURNALS target contained more than 24,000 portfolios of all kinds. The SFX KnowledgeBase Advisory Board (KBAB) carried out an international survey to get an overview of the usage of this target by the SFX community and to precisely identify what could be done to improve it. The target is widely used among the community. However, many respondents complained about three major problems: (a) incorrect links, (b) full texts actually not free, and (c) incorrect or missing thresholds (years and volumes information).

Libraries and their Role in Open Access: Challenges and Opportunities

The open access movement gains momentum with an increasing number of institutions and funders adopting open access mandates for their funded research. Consequently, an increasing amount of material becomes freely available, either from institutional repositories or from traditional or newly established journals. Libraries can play a dual role in supporting this movement: Firstly, they can provide services supporting the deposit of research output in their institutional repositories, including support for making it widely discoverable via indexes such as Google Scholar and library discovery systems. Secondly, libraries can make open access materials discoverable by their patrons through such indexes, thus expanding their collection to include materials that they would not necessarily license. This session will describe the experience of the University Libraries of Liege in Belgium and Harvard. University of Liege chose a top-down approach and made it compulsory for researchers to deposit their output in the institutional repository—ORBi. To support this mandate, the library offers services that help researchers deposit and disseminate their publications. Both libraries—Liege and Harvard—enable their students and faculty to discover open access content beyond their library’s acquired collection via their library discovery system. The session will also address challenges that arise from indexing open access publications and how index providers and libraries can deal with such publications, especially with articles that are deposited in different institutional repositories or published in so-called hybrid journals that contain a mix of open access and subscription articles. Finally, we will discuss with the audience how they see libraries’ role evolving in this area, what challenges they are currently facing, and the solutions and opportunities they have found.