Open Access

Recently, on the Next Generation Catalog for Libraries email list, one of the participants quoted one of their faculty-member library users as saying, 'I just use WorldCat and Google Scholar'. That works pretty well if you are in a big academic institution that has subscriptions one way or another to the articles that Google Scholar might find for you. Our database offerings (which come mostly through the State Library) are not so broad, and you are likely to need to use Interlibrary Loan to get hold of a lot of the articles you may discover using online tools.

This happened to one of our users recently and he was quite taken aback. "I thought there was Open Access," he said, when we told him he could not have immediate electronic access through any of our databases, but would have to wait for a paper copy to come through Interlibrary Loan. On the whole, somebody has to have a subscription. (For example, both College of Santa Fe and Santa Fe Institute have partial JSTOR subscriptions and would let you get access by coming into their library— but no institution in Santa Fe is paying the $40,000 or so dollars per year for a complete package.) But he was also right that the Open Access movement continues to develop. Peter Suber's SPARC Open Access Newsletter has a good summary of, not so much where things stand as which way they are moving.