Open Access and the Future of Scholarly Communication: Policy and Infrastructure Open Access and the Future of Scholarly Communication: Implementation

摘要

This set of two books, which was edited by Kevin Smith and Katherine Dickson, presents an extensive overview of open access and the future of scholarly communication, particular-ly from the perspective of librarians. The first book about pol-icy and infrastructure has 14 chapters and the second book about implementation has 15 chapters. All chapters were writ-ten by different groups of authors. The topics dealt with in the first book include the main principles and concepts of the open access movement, the roles of librarians in prompting open access, various aspects and issues related to library-based open access publishing, insights from interlibrary loan relevant to open access, the long-term viability of open access publishing, metadata standards for open access repositories, and open access research management services. There are also several chapters on specific case studies on the introduc-tion and implementation of open access by university librar-ies. Chapter 5, which presents the story of the musical band Grateful Dead about its policy of allowing its audiences to re-cord and trade tapes of the band's shows freely, is refreshing and provides something to think about in the context of open access. Chapter 6 on the diversity and social justice is also of some interest and gives an advice that classifying some open access journals from developing countries as predatory ones prematurely can be prejudicial.