LCCN, October 21, 2015
ISSN 2324-6464 ABA Summer Hires Contribute to Digital Content Management By Susan Morris, Special Assistant to the Director for Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access Part 1: Madeleine Lee Reviews Open-Access Journals and Licensing Issues The Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access Directorate benefitted from having several recent library/information sciences school graduates as temporary hires in the summer of 2015. "LCCN" is proud to present a two-part series that describes their accomplishments. A webcast of a presentation of these findings to Library of Congress staff is available at http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=6883. Madeleine Lee was hired temporarily by the U.S./Anglo Division (USAN) to spend the summer reviewing the Library's open-access journals and licensing procedures. Open access in the digital age is important for leveraging the impact of libraries' budgets, guaranteeing intellectual freedom, and broadening access to content for underserved and non-specialist populations. Like many aspects of the digital age, open access can create confusion and encourage predatory practices. Licensing and publishing standards are essential safeguards. Lee's primary focus was on creating a model license to use with the Library's e-resource subscriptions. Licensing is a complex issue, but essentially, a license is a contract between a library and an information provider. The library does not own the content - rather, it pays for access to the content. The contracts are often lengthy, complex, and dictate terms of use for the e-resource. Library acquisitions specialists spend a great deal of time negotiating the terms of each license and carefully flag language in the contract that may override copyright law. While several organizations have promoted model licenses, the Library of Congress has distinctive needs for its license agreements, especially concerning liability and jurisdiction. Although nearly all open-access journals are available under the terms of Creative Commons licenses, in reality there are six different versions of the Creative Commons license, leading to a need for consistent and comprehensive license terms. Lee designed a model license that could provide a strong starting point for the Library to use when conducting negotiations with information providers. The next step is for acquisitions specialists in USAN to consult the Office of the General Counsel to refine the model license and promote its use to the Library's information service providers. Lee also identified several categories of open-access journals: Gold Open Access journals are freely available upon publication. These include the Public Library of Science and the journals found in BioMedCentral, a for-profit clearinghouse and publisher of open-access journals based in the United Kingdom but now owned by the Springer publishing group. Typically, gold open access journals will use a generous license and ensure that the author retains copyright, balanced by higher authors' fees for publication. Green Open Access is an author-driven model wherein authors publish versions of their articles in an open access digital repository. Delayed Open Access refers to articles that become freely available after an embargo period that allows the publisher to collect revenue for immediate access to the content. E-journals sometimes include both delayed open access and immediate, free open access articles. Examples of delayed open access include reports of research funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the U.K.-based Wellcome Trust. Those institutions' grant and publication standards require that articles reporting NIH- or Wellcome Trust-funded research be made freely available after a specified embargo period. There are numerous examples of predatory open-access journals that charge exorbitant submission fees to authors; have no peer review to ensure quality of the articles they publish; force authors to cite other articles from their journals; require authors to assign copyright to the journal publisher; or publish research studies that are fabricated outright. To counter these predatory practices, several prominent initiatives are promoting adherence to standards by open-access journals. For example, the Directory of Open-Access Journals (DOAJ), which includes about 10,000 current titles, requires that journals be peer-reviewed and meet its technical standards to be included. The DOAJ worked with the Committee on Publication Ethics, Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, and the World Association of Medical Editors to develop the "Principles of Transparency and Best Practices in Scholarly Publishing" (http://oaspa.org/principles-of-transparency-and-best-practice-in-scholarly- publishing/), and to identify journals that adhere to them. The principles for scholarly publishing include the existence of peer review protocols; a governing body or editorial board; contact information for an editorial team; clear information about author submission fees and copyright assignment policies; guidelines for dealing with alleged research misconduct; clear information about revenue sources, advertising, marketing, and ownership; and clear provisions for archiving content. During her summer work experience, Lee compiled a list of known predatory open-access journals cited in the Library of Congress Electronic Resources Online Catalog. As a result of her efforts, the Library's electronic resources coordinator, Donna Scanlon of the Collection Development Office, will review the titles on the list and recommend their removal from the catalog.
