Access Denied

Open Literacy & the Problem of Access Refusal
Presented by: Robyn Hall, Red Deer College

The goal of this presentation is to look at the dysfunctional relationship between open access and information literacy.  For more information, check out, http://robynhall.ca/openaccess. 

Robyn questions why the costs of journal articles continue to raise, when increasingly they are available online.  High costs make it prohibitive for many libraries to subscribe to these titles.  Currently 30 academic institutions in Canada have an institutional repository publishing the work of their own scholars and making it freely available over the Internet. 

Information Literacy standards are provided by the ACRL, stating that individuals have a foundation for continued growth throughout their careers and are informed citizens and members of communities; yet their need for relevant and accurate information is not adequately satisified once they graduate.

So what happens when a student graduates from university? They suddenly lose access to everything that they previously had access too at university. They have to deal with real world research… which is limited to materials that they can access on their own through the Internet or through their local public library or perhaps their organization.  But what if their organization does not have money to pay money for subscriptions or doesn't see the importance of having such materials?

Open literacy

• Helping students acquire the skills to recognize and contribute to open access
• Open domain, creative commons, open source software and other applications

She was curious how others were providing instruction on open access, so she ran a survey of health sciences librarians throughout Canada.  She chose this group of librarians as they tend to work with students throughout their academic career and there is a need for credible resources in the students' professional careers.  She used http://fluidsurveys.com/ to conduct her study.  Below you will find a summary of the results.

Problems of adding instruction on open access:

• Students need to take baby steps when learning about different resources when this might be the first time that they have been taught information literacy skills - need to have the basics first before they can learn additional skills
• Information noise - just more stuff
• Not relevant to students - many titles can be obscure or not in English
• Paid vs. unpaid - the need to promote titles that we are already paying for
• Not a lot of support for open access from the faculty - institutional culture, publishing or perish, respected titles within the field
• Not enough time

Yet when asked should librarians do more to do teach students about OA? 92% of survey participants said yes.

Suggestions:

• Celebrate Open Access expand to student oriented events
• Including open access in online subject or resource guides
• Adding Open Access to OPAC
• Use open access at the reference desk or in instruction sessions
• Evaluate open access with students; show examples of traditional articles and open access articles
• Question who is the author and what is their authority
• Publish open access assignment in the class, peer-reviewed within the classroom
• Work with individuals in the upper years of their education, or graduate students
• Open access in the context of their future workplace - what they will need to know once they get out into the "real world".
• Work with the alumni office
• Create a lib guide as an outreach tool for graduate students
• Just tell them…

Further Information:
http://righttoreasearch.org/ educates students about open access and engage them in the effort to support these activities. 

http://access2research.org/ is as petition.You do not have to be American to sign this petition.  They need 25,000 signatures and it has to be done by June 19.