Librarians and open access: the case of E-LIS

The literature abounds with information on Open Access. Librarians rally to the cause as part of their responsibility of providing access to information. But what are librarians doing to further the cause of Open Access in their own discipline? E-LIS, short for Eprints in Library and Information Science, aims to further the Open Access philosophy by making available papers in LIS and related fields. It is a free-access international repository and archive, in line with the Free Online Scholarship movement (FOS) and the Eprints movement. The purpose of the E-LIS archive is to make full text documents visible, accessible, harvestable, searchable and useable by any potential user with access to the Internet. Librarians can search and archive their own publications and presentations in E-LIS free of charge. E-LIS promotes self-archiving in LIS (not only in E-LIS) and offer an open archive to authors without acces to an institutional repository. To those who do have an institutional repository it offers the added advantage of an archive that is discipline specific to LIS and increases the visibility for authors in a global respository