The Impact of Open Access on Collection Management

Open access (OA) is a relatively new concept in the long history of published scholarly communication. Although there were already some open access journals in 2002, many point to the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) held in that year as the beginning point of the “open access movement.” The BOAI called for freely available literature which permits “users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.” 1 Since the BOAI, the open access movement has continued to grow and change, and in 2013 David Lewis predicted that over the next ten years, OA would “become the dominant mode for scholarly journal publishing” and recommended that academic libraries “continue to support open access initiatives: institutional deposit mandates; support for open access journals; or funding of open access author fees.” 2 Collection management was also expanding in the 2000s with the addition of access management: the need to facilitate effective and efficient access to electronic materials while still managing physical collections. 3 In 2011 Emilie Delquie asked if the philosophy of collection management was evolving from just collecting information to “‘hooking’ users up with information?” 4 This article examines if and how the integration of OA materials has changed collection and/or access management activities within academic libraries.