2013 Charleston Conference

Open access publishing continues to be a topic of debate and discussion in the popular media, blogs and listservs.  A panel representing different points of view will discuss open access journals and articles from the perspective of metadata and accessibility. Open access content is the utmost accessible content, if students and researchers know how to find it, and know how to judge whether what they find is worthy of inclusion in their research. The discussion will focus on how to make open access publications and articles more accessible.

Questions the session will strive to answer are:

• What metadata elements would help academic librarians and researchers find these resources within the larger databases, institutional repositories, and/or discovery services?
• How do librarians vet open access publications for research by students and faculty?  How do they determine which titles to include in their catalogs, and how to catalog them?
• What are benefits and considerations for identifying the most appropriate open access publications for their researchers to use and to publish in?  And is this identification even needed by researchers?
• What additional information would be helpful?  What role could publishers of directories and providers of link, search, and discovery services play to that would lead to open access content?

Attendees will be encouraged to engage in the discussion and provide input as to what they see as being done well, and what issues they have with open access content. This potentially dynamic discussion we hope will be thought provoking and foster new thinking on the importance of metadata in reliably finding content – and finding reliable content!