2016 Charleston Library Conference

A recent bibliometrics study found that 54% of 4.6 million scientific papers from peer-reviewed journals indexed in Scopus during the years 2011-2013 could be downloaded for free on the internet in April of 2014 (Archambault, et al. 2014). As time rolls on, authors and researchers are increasingly using more-and-less legal scholarly article sharing services to "take back the literature," or even just to access it more conveniently (Bohannon, 2016). The objective of this study was to evaluate a manageable sample of journal articles across the sciences, social sciences and humanities for their availability in gold, green and rogue open access forms, including ResearchGate and Sci-Hub. Attendees will gain a greater appreciation of the extent of open access availability through Google Scholar, Google and commercial discovery systems, and will be challenged to roll with the times by expanding the role of libraries in broadening access to the freely available literature.