In Combining the Old and the New history prof Mills Kelly writes about an interesting approach for introducing first-year college students to library resources: “for the rest of the semester, they proved much more willing to use the databases that our library spends so many hundreds of thousands of dollars to subscribe to.”

As most librarians know, information literacy only really comes about through being integrated into assignments like this, ones that focus on research and writing skills. What’s key to the assignment that Mills talks about is that it shows how digital media, along with personalized topics, can be a motivating factor in a student’s learning.

In the latest SPARC Open Access Newsletter Peter Suber talks about the use of Google ads as a way of supporting electronic journals. There often has been a prejudice against advertising on scholarly sites, the perception that ads - particularly those from Google - somehow lessen the integrity of a site. However, every site - especially scholarly open access e-journals - needs a way to pay the bills. My own experience with Google ads on a couple of my blogs indicate that advertising can be done in an effective way and produce a decent revenue stream.

Of course, a lot of Web sites and a lot of blogs exist primarily as a way of producing income for the publisher through advertising. Then again, a lot of print publishing serve the very same purpose: generating income for the publisher. Librarians certainly know that is true for many scholarly publishers, hence the need for open access online publishing. Yet, I no longer think that placing ads on open access e-journals is a means of “selling out”.

I would caution open access publishers to think carefully about the placement of their ads and how ad programs, such as Google adsense, operate. The default color scheme and appearance of Google ads are rather ugly. There are a number of options that allow publishers to slightly change the appearance of ads. Also, publishers have control over the location of the ads and, to a large degree, the format of the ads. Also, publishers can change the location or remove the ads from their site at any point.

The colors of the ads should blend well with the color scheme of the e-journal itself. In one sense, this makes the ads less intrusive. However, in another sense, it also makes it more likely that a user will click on the ads. Open access publishers need to weigh carefully this balance, though it’s likely that regular readers are not going to click on an e-journal’s advertisement. The advertising clicks will like come from non-regular readers who stumble across the site through an Internet search engine.

There are ways of highly optimizing Web sites for advertising that may result in a site generating a thousand dollars of income per month, just from Google ads. It’s unlikely that an open access e-journal will produce this type of revenue. Sites with high ad revenue often are plastered with ads to the point that the site becomes unreadable. Certainly, not a goal for e-journals. But careful arrangement of the ads should generate a revenue that offsets some of the costs. And for most open access publishing, every bit of funding helps.

E-journals and other open access scholarly sites that are considering advertising should read the blogs that specialize in these topics. One very helpful blog is problogger, which has the best information on the Web for generating income online. While the information on that site is focused on blogs, it can equally be applied to non-blog sites. Indeed, while I’m on the topic of blogs, any e-journal that is considering Google’s adsense should also considering adopting a blog platform, such as WordPress, for managing the e-journal itself. The customization of WordPress for an e-journal is a topic for another post, another day.