Access to Open Access : A study on how Swedish college and university libraries make Open Access journals in physics available

The aim of this Master thesis was to examine how libraries at Swedish colleges and universities make Open Access journals in physics available to users. We examined if, where, and how the 50 Open Access journals that are listed in the Directory of Open Access (DOAJ) under the heading Physics (General) were made available to the public at 19 Swedish colleges and universities. We also examined possible patterns regarding qualities in the Open Access journals and to what extent the libraries made them available. For this descriptive statistic was used. The selection of library portals that were included in the study were those Swedish colleges and universities that teach physics. The searches that form the basis for the results of the study were performed during the period 30/09/2008 -06/12/2008. The results of the study show that a majority of the libraries made at least 94% of the Open Access-journals available to users, and that this was achieved mainly by journal and/or e-journal lists. A majority of the journal lists were generated by SFX, a system libraries can use to make different e-journal packages available to the public, including the package that consists of the Open Access journals listed by DOAJ. This practice might explain the results of the study. Previous research that focuses on how e-journals are made available to the public show that the consensus regarding these resources previously was that they should be made available through library catalogues. This practice now seems to be changing, probably due to the fact that making e-journals available in journal lists instead of library catalogues demands less economic resources. These were the most consistent tendencies found in the material