VOICES OF THE SEARCHERS
The OA Revolution: Redefining the Info Pro’s Role
by Mary Ellen Bates
Our profession has had its share of disruption, starting with the digital revolution in the 1970s, when bibliographic citations became searchable online. We now face the coming apocalypse of generative AI and its illusion of intelligence.
One of the less dramatic developments has been the rise of OA peer-reviewed literature. This shift to covering the publishing costs by author fees or sponsorships has changed librarians’ roles. Traditionally, we provided and managed access through subscriptions. OA transforms us into navigators guiding users through a vast, ever-expanding sea of freely available information.
This comes with challenges. Unlike traditional publications, OA content has variable permissions. Users need help understanding how to credit the work and whether it is suitable for commercial use. Navigating existing licensing agreements alongside OA content requires a nuanced understanding of intellectual property as well as a full understanding of how users expect to access, use, and retain information from OA sources. Adding in a calculation of what access option best serves users and the organization is also important.
The traditional information access model focused on control, with librarians managing institutional subscriptions. OA flips the script, fostering collaboration and transparency. Librarians now manage open repositories, data-sharing initiatives, and collaborative knowledge creation. This necessitates working with researchers, publishers, and other stakeholders in new ways to build sustainable solutions for long-term information accessibility.
Evaluating research quality also requires an overhaul. Traditional metrics might not suffice in the OA landscape, where predatory journals can exploit the ease of OA publication and produce low-quality journals that tarnish the reputation of reputable OA publishers. Issues such as citation stacking, shoddy research, and a superficial or nonexistent peer-review process all contribute to the promulgation of misleading information and the erosion of trust in academic research.
OA journals may take longer to establish themselves and be included in major citation databases, potentially affecting their impact factor. Online indexing services are slowly adapting to include high-quality OA journals. And not all OA journals have the same level of quality control; info pros must investigate the specific journal’s peer-review process to ensure its rigor.
Managing OA resources requires a more proactive approach than managing traditional information sources. Librarians need to anticipate new user needs, including text and data mining and inclusion in large language models; curate high-quality collections; and champion open scholarship practices within their institutions. This could involve advocating for internal policies that support and fund OA publishing and educating researchers on how OA differs from a subscription model, particularly with respect to citation and reuse in for-profit settings.
The abundance of OA resources creates a new challenge: information overload. Librarians continue to act as curators—identifying reputable repositories, filtering out low-quality content, and staying updated on emerging OA trends and resources. But we also focus on finding sustainable solutions for long-term information accessibility and preservation. Beyond articles, OA encompasses the entire research lifecycle, including datasets, programming code, and multimedia, all of which must be preserved.
Librarians often have specialized knowledge within a specific field. OA requires a wider range of content and formats, resulting in the need to expand the scope of our domain knowledge and stay current on diverse OA resources across intersecting and related disciplines.
Librarians face a tightrope walk when it comes to balancing the openness of OA with the need to protect intellectual property. OA promotes open sharing of research, but librarians need to educate users on how to correctly cite OA content, respecting the author’s rights while adhering to the specific license terms of each OA journal. Some licenses might restrict commercial use, require specific sharing formats, or limit modifications, for example. Complicating matters, some libraries may have existing licensing agreements with publishers that allow additional types of use, so librarians must balance the potential benefits of freely available OA resources with the existing access provided by these internal licenses.
As the source, format, and structure of digital information continue to evolve, info pros are called on to advocate for high-quality resources and ensure robust mechanisms to differentiate credible scholarship from predatory practices. AI continues to erode users’ awareness of the source and quality of information, and we must fiercely advocate for trustworthy and IP-compliant content. |
