Tierney Lyons, campus reference librarian, contrasted two trends in scholarly communication in her latest article entitled, "Public Access, Open Access: Outlining the Key Differences."
Increasingly, government agencies are requiring researchers receiving federal grants to make their results freely available, the latest being the Office of Science and Technology Policy.
"For health care and academic administrators facing ongoing financial challenges, the open access initiative and mandates for free public access to scholarly literature will continue to gain importance," Ms. Lyons explained. "Librarians play a role in explaining the difference between public access and open access."
The article appears in the March 2013 issue of MLA News. Her co-author, Donna Gibson, Director of Library Services, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, contributed insight on the history of open access and current publishing models.
They noted that "incorporating networking and collaborative features enhances researchers' options for presenting their work and encourages larger scale peer communication and cross-disciplinary innovation. Such dissemination accelerates scholarly communication by ensuring availability of federal research results in a free, interoperable, and preserved repository."
Ms. Lyons recently accepted a national appointment as the 2013-14 Chair of the Scholarly Communication Committee of the Medical Library Association and serves as a member of the research and assessment committee of its Mid-Atlantic Chapter.
