Sunday, March 15, 2009

Growing Canadian membership in DOAJ!

The list of Canadian members of the Directory of Open Access Journals is growing! As of today, there are 7 Canadian individual library members, 1 Canadian library consortium, and at least 1 individual member that I know of.

Here are the Canadian members as of today:

* Bibliothèque de l'Université Laval
* McGill University Library
* Privy Council Office
* Simon Fraser University Library
* University of British Columbia Library
* University of Saskatchewan Library
* University of Toronto Scarborough

Consortial member: OCUL - Ontario Council of University Libraries.

For in-depth reasons on why libraries should become DOAJ members, see my article in the January 2008 Charleston Advisor. Update: since this article was written in 2007, DOAJ has increased by more than one thousand journals; more many journals are searchable at article level, and new features such as journal lists by country have been added.

Another way to calculate the value of DOAJ membership for your library: analyze the costs of dealing with suggestions from faculty, students, and librarians to add these high-quality open access journals to your collection. If you have your own title list, you can figure out how much work it is to do this on your own. If you don't have a way of handling these suggestions, there is still a cost involved. These queries must be addressed; if you have no way of including these journals in your title lists, reference librarians will be looking them up, over and over, one at a time.

DOAJ membership is definitely an Essential Efficiency in these troubled economic times.