The Impact of Open Access on Library and Information Science (A Research project)
(2005) The Impact of Open Access on Library and Information Science (A Research project).
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Abstract
This is the text of a proposal (unfunded) submitted by Cheryl Knott Malone and Anita Coleman, School of Information Resources and Library Science, University of Arizona, Tucson to the IMLS National Leadership Grants 2005. To what extent does open access improve the impact of an article? This is the deceptively simple question that we will investigate. Our question is an important one if a clear understanding about the open access archive (OAA) phenomenon and what it means for our discipline, Library and Information Science (LIS) is ever to be achieved. We will use DLIST as the testbed for answering our key research question. DLIST is the Digital Library for Information Science and Technology <http://dlist.sir.arizona.edu>, an OAA, where scholars can self-register and deposit research, education, and practice publications that center on cultural heritage institutions such as libraries, archives, and museums. DLIST was established in the summer of 2002 as a disciplinary repository for LIS. DLIST runs on open source software, Eprints, and is compliant with Open Archives Initiative-Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). Thus DLIST is an interoperable data provider in the global chain of OAI repository services. Currently DLIST has about 500 users and 400 documents. Usage of DLIST has grown from 41,156 hits in February 2004 to 112,728 hits in January 2005. To answer the research question we will undertake the following activities over a period of three years. In the first year we will 1) digitize articles from the back issues of the Journal of Education for Library and Information Science (JELIS), the premier journal for all matters related to library education; 1) conduct a citation study of JELIS articles to benchmark their research impact prior to deposit in DLIST, 2) deposit and create the metadata for digitized JELIS articles in DLIST; and 3) complete the writing of a DLIST User Guide and Self-Archiving Workshops manual. In the second year of the project, we will 1) survey LIS faculty to determine a baseline of copyright awareness and scholarly communication behaviors related to self-archiving in the LIS education community, and 2) offer DLIST self-archiving workshops at four selected conferences. The workshops will introduce scholars to OAA and how to self-archive using DLIST. In the third year of the project, 1) participants who completed the DLIST workshops and surveys will be surveyed again, 2) a follow-up citation study to document citation rates and patterns of the digitized and deposited JELIS articles will be conducted, and 3) will be analyzed with usage of JELIS articles in DLIST to understand the impact of open access. The goal of the second survey is to determine how behaviors may have changed and find out how the JELIS articles in DLIST, were used in ways that may not be revealed through mere citation data. This will contribute a richer understanding of impact than if we had only quantitative data from DLIST usage logs and citation rates and patterns (traditional research impact factors only) for JELIS. Current experience with DLIST has given us tantalizing evidence that open access to the JELIS articles will have an impact and that the nature of the impact will be diverse and rich, not just limited to research citations. For example, informally gathered DLIST usage ‘nuggets’ are often about the usefulness of DLIST materials for classroom teaching (sometimes in a global context, as when we learned that it is used in a LIS school in Czechoslovakia) and networking among LIS teachers, researchers and practitioners.
| EPrint Type: | Other |
|---|---|
| Keywords: | Journal of Education for Library and Information Science; JELIS |
| Subjects: | Scholarly Communication |
| ID Code: | 967 |
| Deposited On: | 10 November 2005 |
| Eprint Statistics: | View statistics for this eprint |
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