Survey on Open Access collection development and management: a comparison analysis between Italy and UK

Abstract

As Open Access (OA) resources increase, libraries, particularly academic libraries, tackle with the challenge to manage OA resources in an appropriate and sustainable way. As a matter of fact, the huge emphasis placed by libraries on advocacy and access to OA collections has postponed the problem to find strategies to best develop and manage OA collections.

Even though OA collections are normally toll free, or mainly toll free there is still a need to manage them in a proper and sustainable way. For example, Article Processing Charges (APCs) present problems of budget allocation and control. Other interesting issues to be tackled are: how are OA resources selected and advocated in order to support them and how and where are local OA resources indexed, if they are indexed? How are they preserved in the long term?

To explore some of these issues in February 2014 authors carried out a comparative survey on OA collection development and management in UK and in Italy. The goal of the survey was to analyze the way academic libraries in UK and in Italy manage OA collection and if there are relevant differences in OA collection development and management between the two countries. To carry out the survey the authors conceived an online questionnaire divided into three parts: 1) OA collection development; 2) OA collection management; and 3) OA collection preservation strategies. This paper will present the results of our comparative survey.