Book: Open Access and the Future of Scholarly Communication – Implementation

Citation: Smith, K.L., & Dickson, K.A. (2017). Open Access and the Future of Scholarly Communication: Implementation. Creating the 21st-Century Academic Library. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

This book of collected essays considers OA from a very specific viewpoint: Academic libraries that want or need to implement OA initiatives at their institution.

Although that’s a relatively narrow focus, a number of very different aspects of OA are considered, among them: copyright and authors’ rights, OA pay-to-publish models, electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs), open data and metadata, and OA publishing of undergraduate research.

A number of the included essays fall into the case study structure fairly typical of academic library research, with insights that–while fine–may be difficult to replicate at other institutions or in other situations. A few are also fairly basic reviews that will be helpful to librarians new to scholarly communication, but not so useful elsewhere.

On the other hand, there are a number of pieces like Zeller and Stenberg’s “Faculty Require Online Distribution of Student Work: Enter the Librarian”, which take a more broadly practical approach to the topic. Zeller and Steinberg’s article, for example, includes a series of appendices librarians can use as checklists when making undergraduate work available under an OA license.

Despite some of its essays being average in execution, the book as a whole is a useful read for the practically-minded librarian with an interest in scholarly communication.