Journal collection management and Open Access – relationship status: it’s complicated

Abstract

A lot of different factors had an impact on journal management in the last years. The exhaustive discussions about new license models and the need to provide all kind of data, will cause further changes in the future. One of the actual challenges is the Open Access movement. It has been developed since slightly more than ten years, partly in order to redistribute academic funds and to reduce libraries' license costs. But it has not yet been examined if and how Open Access has influenced journal management processes and how journal management might influence the distribution of Open Access. The purpose of this study is to analyze how journal management in academic libraries (selection, cost organization and allocation) changes through the influence of Open Access and in what form the Open Access movement could be supported by established structures and processes of journal management. In the empirical part, the hypotheses will be verified through an international survey (Germany, Europe (mainly Great Britain), North America (mainly US)) of libraries' journal management staff in March and April 2014. The specific legal, political and economic regulations related to Open Access in every country are providing the possibility to identify major factors of handling Open Access in libraries. The questionnaire includes questions about present processes of journal collection management and Open Access as well as future plans and expected changes. In this article, the first results of the survey will be presented and we will try to find out of how Open Access and journal collection management can be in a stable relationship and what challenges harmonic processes.