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Introduction xiii Open Access In its broadest sense, the term open access is used to describe knowledge resources that are made available in the public domain for public access, with- out the hindrance of subscription fee or access charges. The philosophy ­ behind OA initiatives is to provide ­ free of charge and unhindered access to research and its publications without copyright restrictions. The premise of this philosophy is that research funded by taxpayers should be available ­ free of charge to taxpayers, and research as a public good should be available to all irrespective of their paying capacity. The three OA declarations, commonly known as the BBB declarations, argue that OA research lit­er­ a ­ ture has not only made new ideas easy and quick to disseminate, but the impact of research can be quantitatively evaluated by vari­ous types of bibliometric, scientometric, and webometric methods. One of the most popu­lar forms of OA publishing is in OA repositories. Open access institutional repositories (OA IRs) are electronic systems that ­ capture, preserve, and provide access to the scholarly digital work of an insti- tution. IRs offer faculty an easy submission pro­cess of scholarly works that encourages collaboration and wider dissemination. The development of both and OA journals have made libraries key stakeholders in the debate of the ­IR future of scholarly communication. However, despite all of the benefits described by the proponents of OA, a large number of repositories remain thinly populated and scholars have been reluctant to embrace OA repositories. Academic Libraries Academic libraries play an impor­tant role in facilitating the scholarly com- munication pro­cess and transforming the way scholarly work is produced, disseminated, accessed, and preserved. The first step to develop effective scholarly commutation program that ­will meet campus community needs is understanding it is critically impor­tant to understand students, faculty, and researchers’ needs and concerns regarding dif­fer­ent modes of OA publishing. ­ There is a wide range of issues that concern faculty and researchers in regard to embracing OA publishing. The identified issues and concerns include copy- right and plagiarism concerns, perceived difficulty with submission, and perception of IRs as low-­quality publishing venues due to the lack of peer review pro­cess for a number of OA publishing platforms. Library and information professionals usually use the term “scholarly com- munication” to describe a wide range of activities related to author rights, open access, open educational resources, the serials crisis, scholarly digital (digitally native) publishing, and other forms of publishing. All of ­these