Dear colleagues,

Although WLIC 2020 has been canceled, IFLA Acquisition and Collection Development Section (ACD) is proceeding with its work virtually. One of the Section’s priorities is to focus on the Open Access movement. The ACD Section is launching a survey to collect information on Open Access content and help us understand the following question: “How is the transition to Open Access impacting library collection, content development and management, including the scholarly communication infrastructure and the traditional supply chain of scholarly information?”

While the concept of Open Access to scholarly literature is not new, the realization of it is a moving target. During the last few years, libraries have taken a very strong advocacy position regarding the Open Access movement, even though it produces challenges in traditional collection development relationships that libraries had with publishers, content providers, acquisition workflows, and any materials routinely added to library collections. The Acquisition and Collection Development Section is interested in exploring the challenges that the increase in the availability of open access resources (articles, books, data, and other types of open content) is currently posing to collection, content development and management in libraries. Our objective is to create a robust information resource that will help librarians in their collection development work.

The questionnaire will be available until 22nd November 2020 and will take ten minutes or less to complete. It includes closed and open-ended questions. We are especially interested in your answers to open-ended questions. Your responses will help us understand the current Open Access-related challenges in libraries around the globe and enable us to develop relevant information resources.

All collected information and your answers to the questions will be anonymized. Any personal or potentially identifying information will be removed or changed before outcomes are shared in a report, and results are made public. The Section members leading this work may contact individual respondents if they have follow up questions. The Section will present the results of the survey at the next IFLA Congress.

You may contact the co-leads of the ACD Action Plan for Open Access, Dr. Franziska Wein at Franziska.Wein@uni-erfurt.de or Karin Byström at karin.bystrom@ub.uu.se with any queries. Please click here to start the survey.

Thank you very much for your time and support.

 


Sincerely,
IFLA Acquisition and Collection Development Section