Abstract
With the rise of alternate discovery services, such as Google Scholar, in conjunction with the increase in open access content, researchers have the option to bypass academic libraries when they search for and retrieve scholarly information. This state of affairs implies that academic libraries exist in competition with these alternate services and with the patrons who use them, and as a result, may be disintermediated from the scholarly information seeking and retrieval process. Drawing from decision and game theory, bounded rationality, information seeking theory, citation theory, and social computing theory, this study investigates how academic librarians are responding as competitors to changing scholarly information seeking and collecting practices. Bibliographic data was collected in 2010 from a systematic random sample of references on CiteULike.org and analyzed with three years of bibliometric data collected from Google Scholar. Findings suggest that although scholars may choose to bypass libraries when they seek scholarly information, academic libraries continue to provide a majority of scholarly documentation needs through open access and institutional repositories. Overall, the results indicate that academic librarians are playing the scholarly communication game competitively.
Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
2-2014
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/S0732-067120140000032003
Repository Citation
Burns, C. Sean, "Academic Libraries and Open Access Strategies" (2014). Information Science Faculty Publications. 8.
https://uknowledge.uky.edu/slis_facpub/8
Notes/Citation Information
Published in D. Williams & J. Golden (Eds.), Advances in Library Administration and Organization, v. 32, p. 147-211.
This article is (c) Emerald Group Publishing and permission has been granted for this version to appear here (http://uknowledge.uky.edu/slis_facpub/8/). Emerald does not grant permission for this article to be further copied/distributed or hosted elsewhere without the express permission from Emerald Group Publishing Limited.
The document available for download is the author's post-peer-review final draft of the book chapter.