May 2019 295 C&RL News March 2019 saw a gambit in the open access (OA) movement that may be as significant as Harvard’s OA policy: The University of California System declined to renew their subscriptions with a major scientific publish- er.1 It is a gutsy move—but inspiring to see a major research university walk the talk, and, in this case, walk away from the negotiating table. Now other universities in the United States and across the world, are holding their collective breath to see what will happen— will the dominoes fall? I will admit to a cautionary advocacy for OA, likely due to the different roles that come into consideration of the publication process. For librarians, access to knowledge and infor- mation is a universal ideal. For consumers, it is necessary for learning and development, as well as the transmission and application of ideas. For authors, access and use is necessary to promote scholarly and community dialogue, but so is maintaining the integrity of the work. As an editor, I have seen how much work goes into reviewing, editing, and publication —some of it based on volunteer roles (such as reviewers) and some of it by virtue of job responsibilities. College & Research Libraries is an open access publication. It is supported by a large group of librarians and scholars who serve as reviewers, and by ACRL staff, who are just as dedicated and expert in their jobs. I am gratified by the commitment and expertise that all of these individuals dem- onstrate. The success of the journal and the quality of the articles and studies published in it are due to their efforts. It, in fact, could not be accomplished without their time and expertise nor without the support of ACRL in terms of funding and infrastructure. When I think about OA, that is what I see as the standard—not unfettered information, but organized, useful, accessible knowledge that is both sustained and transparent. While ac- cess is an issue, so is having some way to determine the quality of the information. It has also seemed to me, as a library instructor working with students, that OA is an absolute necessity for lifelong learning. Helping students learn how to find, evaluate, and use information effectively is a primary mission of the profession. While they do need to learn how to use the disciplinary literature and how to find scholarly studies, they also need to be able to navigate open source in- formation—news, government information, data on health, business, etc.—in order to make decisions once they graduate. Training students to be expert searchers in EBSCO or NEXIS will only serve them when they are students. Granted, some of those tactics are transferable, but only if they learn the strategy and the skills, not just how to navigate in a specific database. I attended SXSWedu recently, and there were, unsurprisingly, several sessions on fake news and information integrity and how to address these issues in terms of education (K–12 and higher education). One of the sessions was a panel discussion, which I found very engaging, but one of the solutions presented by a panelist was a system/site that would review news stories and give them a red check or a green check so consumers would know what was “good” and what was “suspect.” There was acknowledgement that this approach cannot be black or white, but, even so, I found it troubling. My primary concern was that this actually takes the power out of the hands of the consumer. It excuses students (and the public) from taking respon- sibility for their choices, and in a real way, it takes away their power and responsibility for finding relevant and reliable information. It is alarming that individuals might hand over their autonomy and decision-making for an easy button. The May issue of College & Research Libraries contains two articles that address C&RL S p o t l i g h tWendi Kaspar Wendi Kaspar is C&RL editor and policy sciences librarian at the Texas A&M University Policy Sciences and Economics Library, email: warant@tamu.edu mailto:warant%40tamu.edu?subject= C&RL News May 2019 296 the topic of OA. One explores the roles that academic librarians can take on to support open education resources, while the other looks at the motivations of authors who have chosen OA. The first study discusses how librarians both advocate and take on crucial roles to support faculty use of OER. The second study is an analysis of factors that influenced faculty to choose OA venues, including financial considerations, peer attitudes, and personal values. Expanding the examination of schol- arly engagement, this issue also includes sig- nificant articles examining scholarly impact, format preferences, and use from disciplinary, cultural, and operational perspectives. Lastly, there are two studies investigating the health and climate in the profession with a thought- ful consideration of burnout in the profession and a critical analysis of gender and pay. “Bridging the Chasm: Faculty Support Roles for Academic Librarians in the Adoption of Open Educational Resources” by Dr. Brad- dlee and Amy VanScoy. Despite demonstrated student benefits from Open Educational Resources (OER), especially those in com- munity colleges, faculty adoption remains marginal. This study is framed by diffusion of innovations theory, which acknowledges that adoption of an innovation must exceed a tipping point to ensure enduring success. The study focuses on community college faculty with demonstrated OER engagement, on the basis that these faculty have greater likelihood to adopt OER and help “bridge the chasm.” In surveying faculty, we tested a range of roles librarians have played in supporting OER adoption. Findings show that faculty value librarians’ roles in discovery, cataloging, and information literacy but are less open to librar- ians operating outside these traditional roles, including mentoring and policy development. Faculty were supportive of librarians’ role in advocacy for OER and, overall, felt that librar- ians have a role to play in the OER movement on their campuses. “Faculty Format Preferences in the Perform- ing Arts: A Multi-Institutional Study” by Joe C. Clark, Jonathan Sauceda, and Sheridan Stormes. Resources for teaching in higher education have undergone a tremendous evolution during the past several decades. The Internet and commercial services, such as YouTube and Google, have revolutionized the manner by which students and faculty access information to both conduct research and meet course requirements. This mixed methods study implemented an online survey and interviews to determine how perform- ing arts faculty at three institutions integrate library resources and services into their teaching. Conclusions indicate that, while personal collections and Internet resources provide a majority of teaching content, the academic library still offers important access to materials for instruction. “Have Academic Libraries Overcome the Gender Wage Gap? An Analysis of Gender Pay Inequality” by Quinn Galbraith, Adam Henry Callister, and Heather Kelley. This re- port draws upon two data sets to examine the gender wage gap among member institutions of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL). The first dataset consists of 35 years of salary survey data collected by ARL and is used to provide trend data on the gender wage gap from 1980 to 2014, as well as presenting an in-depth look at the wage gap in 2014. After controlling for variables such as years of ex- perience, position, and type of library in the 2014 ARL Salary Survey data, results revealed that women on average made approximately 2 percent less than their male counterparts in 2014. The second dataset comes from a survey of ARL institutions conducted by the researchers in 2015 and is used to explore the influence of additional variables on the gender wage gap that were not found in the ARL Sal- ary Survey data. Results from both datasets suggest a substantial difference between the gender wage gap in ARL institutions and the workforce as a whole. “Altruism or Self-Interest? Exploring the Motivations of Open Access Authors” by Rob- ert Heaton, Dylan Burns, and Becky Thoms. May 2019 297 C&RL News More than 250 authors at Utah State University published an OA article in 2016. Analysis of survey results and publication data from Scopus suggests that the following factors led authors to choose OA venues: ability to pay publishing charges, disciplinary colleagues’ positive attitudes toward OA, and personal feelings, such as altruism and desire, to reach a wide audience. Tenure status was not an apparent factor. This article adds to the body of literature on author motivations and can inform library outreach and marketing efforts, the creation of new publishing models, and the conversation about the larger scholarly publishing landscape. “The State of Academic Liaison Librarian Burnout in ARL Libraries in the United States” by Jennifer Nardine. This study investigates the incidence and acuteness of occupational burnout in full-time Association of Research Libraries liaison/subject librarians in the United States, using the Maslach Burnout Inventory and Areas of Worklife Survey. Findings show that lack of personal agency is the primary contributor to a sense of burnout and that while many liaisons feel significant levels of overwork and lack of fair treatment, positive correlation between institutional and personal values runs high regardless of gender, time as a liaison, or time spent at a particular institution. This values relationship, along with a strong sense of personal efficacy, may moderately offset burnout symptoms. Still, findings indicate a need for further study of burnout in the overall academic librarian population, as well as a significant need for change in liaison librarians’ professional experiences to ease their reported levels of burnout. “The Scholarly Impact of Books Acquired via Approval Plan Selection, Librarian Orders, and Patron-Driven Acquisitions as Measured by Citation Counts” by David C. Tyler, Bri- anna D. Hitt, Francis A. Nterful, and McKenna R. Mettling. Patron-driven acquisition has been an important, if contentious, topic for decades, with numerous programs having been piloted, adopted, and reported on, largely favorably, in the library literature. Still, questions and doubts persist for academic libraries, especially where the composition of vendor plans and packages and the judgment of patrons are concerned. Past literature has approached the assessment of patron-driven acquisition by analyzing circulation/usage, comparing peer-library holdings, seeking patron or librarian judgments of utility and suitability, looking for evidence of collection imbalances, and testing for overlap in patron and librarian purchases. To contribute to this literature, this study addresses scholarly impact and examines whose selections—ap- proval plan, librarian, or patron—have been most heavily cited. For the social sciences, the sciences, and the humanities, the authors gathered topic-matched random samples of books acquired via approval plans and librarian orders during the first five years of operation of their institutions’ interlibrary loan, purchase-on-demand, or patron-driven acquisition program and compared their cita- tion counts to the counts of books acquired via the program. Google Scholar was em- ployed to tally citations. “Citing East Asia: A Citation Study on the Use of East Asian Materials in East Asian Studies Dissertations” by Xiang Li. Aiming to understand how scholars of East Asian Stud- ies use East Asian sources (mainly in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) in their research, this citation study analyzed bibliographies of 213 PhD dissertations from 32 (East) Asian Studies programs in the United States and Canada, from 2013 to 2015. The study examined the number and percentage of East Asian sources cited in each bibliography, as well as format and publication year of each East Asian source cited. The results have important and practical implications for collection develop- ment and management. Note 1. https://www.universityofcalifornia. edu/news/why-uc-split-publishing-giant -elsevier. https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/why-uc-split-publishing-giant-elsevier https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/why-uc-split-publishing-giant-elsevier https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/why-uc-split-publishing-giant-elsevier