My paper has been archived at E-LIS and it is titled: The Next Generation Online Public Access Catalog in Academic Libraries
http://eprints.rclis.org/17103/

The stakes are high in OA -- scholarly journal and book publishers as well as aggregaters of scholarly content have huge financial investments which OA could effect, scholars rely on impact factors and the prestige of scholarly journals to obtain and maintain tenure status, and institutions rely on scholarly publishing as a whole to perform their mandate of dissemination of knowledge and research to the world at large. Libraries, as a group, are the largest 'consumers' of scholarly publishing whether it be in the form of print subscriptions or database subscriptions.

Academic librarians in some institutions have a strong and vital relationship with both faculty and administration, while at other institutions their ability to impact change is less well-developed. Some colleges and universities grant faculty status to librarians but many others do not. Even with faculty status, however, librarians are often thought of as 'less than' teaching faculty by professors in subject disciplines.

What stake do libraries have in the open access movement?

Libraries have a financial stake and a philosophical stake in the open access movement. First of all, one of the factors in OA's recent and current popularity is the rising costs of serial subscriptions combined with stagnant or declining library budgets. As Peter Suber points out in his Open Access Overview, journal prices have risen at four times the rate of inflation since the 1980s. Library budgets cannot keep up with this rate, even at the wealthiest university libraries. As I learned in a class on Issues in Academic Libraries last semester, academic libraries are also competing with other student services (most notably computing services) for an ever-decreasing portion of the university budget. This means it is unlikely that libraries will get significant budget increases, even after the current economic crisis is past.

What role can libraries and librarians play in the Open Access movement?

One of the easiest things that an academic library can do to play in the Open Access movement is to include Open Access journals in the library catalog (Suber, 2007).  The SJSU Library catalog includes many Open Access journals.  Many of these catalog records also include links to related open access resources.  The record for Open Medicine includes a link to two directories of open access journals.  The catalog record for the Public Library of Science (PLoS) includes links to PubMed Central and the Directory of Open Access Journals.  The Directory of Open Access Journals also provides journal title level metadata to assist libraries in cataloging Open Access journals.

I've done a great deal of study of copyright and fair use, whic has led me into a huge interest in the open movement. I've used open source software for quite a while and advocate for open access to information / scholarship in general. I work in a university library, and today I talked with a professor who said that the Chancellor and Provost just don't see the value (impact value) of OA journals so he won't risk publishing there. I'm hoping that the academic world (i.e., tenure track) will begin to see the value of open access to information as well as the peer-reviewed excellence of many OA journals.

As a soon-to-be librarian, I have a keen interest in free and open access to information. The open movements we're exploring in this class are clearly related to this important aspect of the profession's values. As someone who has an interest in academic libraries in particular, I have heard and read many references to open access, especially with reference to digital repositories of faculty publications.