LIS authors and LIS publishing

I wasn't quite sure what to call this rant. It all started with the question: Why do LIS authors keep publishing in journals held behind cost barriers?

I just don’t get it. We run around screaming at professors, etc. about institutional repositories (IRs) and why they should be making their research freely available. We also talk about the need to start supporting open access journals and the growing impact factors for open access journals. But we, as a discipline, are still publishing a majority of our articles in journals that are behind barriers and not in IRs. Put your money where your mouth is, for Pete’s sake! (Check out Oxford for a lovely description of that phrase).

Why aren’t we? Is it a lack of viable options? DOAJ lists 74 LIS journals in many languages. At first glance, this would seem like a good-sized group in which to start to publish/cluster our research. I wonder what the impact factors are for these titles, if any. I wonder how much research they actually publish and what they are publishing on. How many are peer-reviewed? There is no evaluation of these titles that I’m aware of.

Perhaps we don’t care about publishing our articles as open access because we do so little research? LIS research evidence isn’t extensive. Koufogiannakis et al (2004 227) identified 217 LIS journals total for 2001. Only 91 were identified as peer-reviewed journals and thus relevant for their article. The 91 journals produced 2664 articles and of these, only 807 (30.3%) were classified as “research” (defined on p. 241 of their article). They also noted that a majority (40.8%) of the “research” articles published in 2001 are actually descriptive articles (329 articles).

It seems to me that since so little research is being done, now is the time to start new open access journals or to make key, peer-reviewed journals open access – before the field grows any larger (assuming tenure requirements are driving an increased peer publication rate). With Synergies and Alouette now is a great time to develop and load new journals to university servers that act as nodes on the research infrastructure of Canada. (Maybe we need to out-web the WWW by creating a rigorous research infrastructure for Canada?)

How important are these open access journals or IRs when the research we currently do doesn’t seem very rigorous? This can be very important according to Alma Swann’s in American Scientist (2007). She argues that “the advance of science is the prime reason that access is imperative” and that open access accelerates the speed at which science moves, resulting in shorter research cycles. As an example she notes the time between when an article is loaded into arXiv and when it is cited is shrinking. Now OK, there is disagreement whether LIS is a social science or science but I would argue the idea remains valid for any field.

Yah, ok, if your renewal/promotion/permanence guidelines include impact factors you have a problem. But this can be changed and should be changed. As purveyors of information and promoters of freedom of information and access we have an obligation to reflect our values.

Koufogiannakis, Denise, Linda Slater, and Ellen Crumley. “A content analysis of librarianship research,” Journal of Information Science 30 (June 2004): 227-39.

Swan, Alma. "Open access and the progress of science," American Scientist 95 (May-June): n/a.