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Book Review
 Open Access and the Future of Scholarly Communication: Policy and Infrastructure Open Access and the Future of Scholarly Communication: Implementation
Kihong Kimorcid
Science Editing 2017;4(1):46-47.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.6087/kcse.91
Published online: February 20, 2017

Department of Physics, Ajou University, Suwon, Korea

Correspondence to Kihong Kim khkim@ajou.ac.kr
• Received: January 26, 2017   • Accepted: February 3, 2017

Copyright © Korean Council of Science Editors

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Product Information:
• Title: Open Access and the Future of Scholarly Communication: Policy and Infrastructure
• Edition: 1st ed.
• Editors: Kevin L. Smith, Katherine A. Dickson
• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Year of publication: 2016
• ISBN: 978-1442273023
• Page: 318 pages
• Price: $45.00
se-4-1-46i2.gif
• Title: Open Access and the Future of Scholarly Communication: Implementation
• Edition: 1st ed.
• Editors: Kevin L. Smith, Katherine A. Dickson
• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Year of publication: 2016
• ISBN: 978-1442275034
• Page: 340 pages
• Price: $45.00
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, particularly from the perspective of librarians. The first book about policy and infrastructure has 14 chapters and the second book about implementation has 15 chapters. All chapters were written 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 introduction and implementation of open access by university libraries. Chapter 5, which presents the story of the musical band Grateful Dead about its policy of allowing its audiences to record 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.
In the second book on implementation, there are chapters on copyright transfers and licenses, library support for courses that require open access distribution, library support for gold open access author fees, open educational resources, the use of alternative metrics, open access in the context of undergraduate education and publishing, electronic thesis and dissertation and the student anxieties associated with them, open government data, library metadata, and text mining of digital collections. It is surprising to find that in some areas of humanities and social sciences, there still exist a substantial number of academics who are resistant to the idea of open access, while it has been widely accepted in science, engineering, and medicine. It is persuasive that librarians can play a positive role in alleviating their fears of open access.
It appears that librarians, as a group, are very strong advocates for the open access movement for various reasons. The main theme running through the whole chapters is that open access is truthful to the spirit of libraries of sharing knowledge freely with everybody. Most chapters are introductory and easy to read. I have found, however, that the chapter on metadata standards is hard to read, since there is not much explanation of the background material. In addition, the writing style of a few chapters is not concise and somewhat redundant. I have also found that some chapters on the case studies of library publishing are rather similar and are redundant. In spite of the diverse topics included in these books, I think those topics were chosen mainly for librarians and not for the more general readers interested in open access. Nevertheless, I think these are very good books for understanding the principles and practicalities of open access and its role in scholarly communication not only for librarians but also for everybody.

No potential conflict of interest relevant to this article was reported.

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