The Open Access Availability of Library and Information Science Literature

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. imply stated, a primary goal of the open access (OA) movement is to make scholarly literature freely available online. 1 And since the movement's inception, libraries have been near the forefront, advocating for OA, establishing institutional repositories, creating and supporting the development of OA journals, working with faculty and researchers to promote OA, and educating their constituencies about the problems in the scholarly communication system. In many ways, this involvement likely grew out of the principles of librarianship that align with the OA movement and at the same time out of necessity based on the crisis in scholarly communication that has led to increasing pressures on library budgets. These roles would lead one to assume that scholars and practitioners in the field of Library and Information Science (LIS) consistently make their scholarship freely available online by posting them in institutional and subject repositories. To determine whether this is indeed the case, the OA availability of articles from 20 LIS journals published in 2007 was examined. Background There are two main routes to provide OA to scholarly literature: OA journals and through placing articles published in traditional toll journals in OA archives or repositories.