Editorial

Embracing an Open Future

Rachel Scott and Michael Fernandez

This issue of LRTS marks the first under the guidance of the new editorial team, and we’d like to take this opportunity to introduce ourselves, describe the work we are currently undertaking, and look ahead towards our goals for this publication. We are both pleased to work with our colleagues throughout the profession to ensure that LRTS remains integral to the scholarship and practice of library collections, technical services, scholarly communication, and related areas. LRTS is in a time of transition. We began our work in March and have since finalized the editorial board, familiarized ourselves with the articles under review, and met with a variety of groups in the Core shared governance structure. Core is still a young organization and the editorial staff of the three Core journals—Information Technology and Libraries, Library Leadership & Management, and LRTS—have been given the charge of bringing the journals into alignment. Among other things, this will mean implementing a shared procedure to facilitate name change requests and, eventually, migrating all journals to a unified platform. Importantly, it will also mean that LRTS content will be free to read with no embargo beginning in 2023.

Both Information Technology and Libraries and Library Leadership & Management have operated as platinum open access journals for several years. LRTS accordingly has a bit of catching up to do! Considering that LRTS engages with scholarly communication, library collections, and acquiring, making discoverable, and preserving the scholarly record, we see this as an important opportunity for the journal to practice what it preaches and model the kind of change toward openness that we would like the scholarly publishing community to embrace. The pace of change is rapid within technical services and comfort with ambiguity and openness only grows in importance. The specifics of funding and maintaining open access publishing for Core journals are still under discussion, and we are excited to navigate the implementation of a sustainable open access model with input from the Core community. As these details become finalized we will, of course, be happy to share the good news with our readership, so watch this space! We are very much looking forward to this change that will broaden the reach of the scholarship and research being produced by LRTS contributors.

Speaking of which, we are grateful to all of those who contributed to this issue—the authors, anonymous reviewers, and our predecessors Mary Beth Weber and Elyssa Gould—and we hope that you will find this issue beneficial to your practice and understanding.

In this issue of LRTS:

• Lindsey Lowry shares the results of a survey that considers “Soft Skills for Technical Services Professionals in the Academic Library.” The findings show that interpersonal communication and teamwork skills are perceived as essential to technical services work and reiterate that despite persistent stereotypes suggesting otherwise, technical services employees are collaborative and service oriented.
• Damla Yılmaz and Yurdagül Ünal offer an analysis of “Evidence-Based Acquisition at Hacettepe University Libraries” focused on that institution’s EBA plan for Cambridge University Press e-books. The authors find that although over half of the collection consisted of general research monographs and only 27 percent of coursebooks, both the unique books used and total usage favored coursebooks (47 percent and 62 percent, respectively) to general research books (41 percent and 29 percent, respectively).
• Book reviews