Open Access & DOAJ

     In library school, people talked a lot about open access. I'm going to say it was far more professors than students, though. Why? Two main factors that cause people to talk about OA are necessity or ideals. 
     Students are in school (duh)... schools that pay for them to have access to journals and information they need. They don't have to think about the need for equal access to information, because they have access. Professors also have this access, but are usually a little older and wiser than their students and understand the general benefit to equal education OA provides. Also, their jobs concern intellectual endeavors, so they usually have time to think about this kind of thing at the office. 
When I'm writing a comprehensive literature review of new reference services, am I thinking about equal information access and how many tens of thousands of dollars my university library is paying to supply me with these journals? No, I'm pretty much wondering which caffeinated beverage is more likely to boost my awareness enough to finish my paper. It's not that I'm not intellectual, it's just that maintaining singular focus on the topic at hand (i.e. caffeine and new reference services) is necessary for survival as a graduate student. And I'm also not thinking about my publishing rights with for-profit journals vs. OA because I don't publish. Most students usually don't.


     However, now that I have graduated and am skint, I need to keep up with library happenings for free. I'm sure this is an issue for many MLS grads. Besides reading blogs and checking out website articles (like through American Libraries or Wired) I need some OA scholarly journals to keep updated with.
     The DOAJ, or Directory of Open Access Journals, is where I started. There are "117 journals belonging to subject: Library and Information Science." I went through this list and narrowed down to the links below. I'll do more posts after I actually really delve into these journals to review, eliminate and make a list of the ones I found helpful (the keepers).

• B Sides 
• Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
• code4lib
• Collaborative Librarianship
• Communications in Information Literacy
• D-Lib
• E-JASL: The Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship
• Evidence Based Library and Information Practice
• The Journal of Electronic Publishing
• JIL: Journal of Information Literacy
• Journal of Library Innovation
• Library Student Journal
• North Carolina Libraries
• VA Lib: Virginia Libraries

     It took a while to go through these, check out some of the articles to see if they were of interest, didn't contain too many international articles, etc. Also, the DOAJ needs to update. Many journals are listed as multiples, there is no end year notation and there have been a lot of name and publisher changes in the list. 

     More to come on open access and how I'm staying updated in library affairs.