The Zombie Stack Exchanges That Just Won't Die
One of the claims against open access books is that university libraries won't use their budgets to purchase a copy. (I have heard this from a few different academic book publishers.) Is this true? Do libraries check to see if there are online open access copies and use that information to decide not to purchase a book? Or are there libraries that will go out of their way to purchase copies of these kinds of books to further support the open access movement?
Trevor Owens
Funny you should ask! When our institution was contemplating an electronic theses and dissertations program, I (as library representative on the ETD working group) was sent to ask our collection developers this very question.
The answer was a resounding "huh?" Nobody I talked to considered this even a remote factor in collection-development decisions. In the specific case of books that were originally theses, our collection developers were well aware that dissertations and books are different enough that a dissertation is not always an acceptable substitute for a book derived from it.
More generally, I believe investigations on the publisher side have shown mixed and unpredictable effects on purchasing from making a book available OA. This recent (and OA) article on the subject may be of interest.
At this point, I am still buying print books, even if they are available online. I'm a small branch library within a large university (with my own budget), and in two cases I can think of, I have acquired the print version of an online book. And in both of those cases, I know that the print book has circulated within the past 2 years. One book is open access and the other is proprietary, but both are easily accessible online to our patrons -- and they still prefer to borrow the print title. hope that helps!
We're a research university, not a huge one - about 15,000 undergrads. Our collections budget has been cut about 30% in the past 3 years. As a rule do not buy things we know we have alternate access to - through a package, or because it's freely available online. Places with a rosier budget picture may well have different options.
Having said that, for individual works there's not an efficient way to determine that at this point - I don't search the web for every title I consider purchasing. Additionally, most of our purchases come on our approval plan, which does not check for such things. I only check for certain things I buy with discretionary funds, like conference proceedings and certain publishers I'm aware of (like National Academies Press).