Michigan State University

Collection Development Policy Statement: Biological Sciences/Natural History

Factors Influencing Collection Policy

Anticipated Future Library Trends:  

The following are areas of study and research that are and will remain significant for collection development as these are areas that are stressed within the departments covered in this policy: Great Lakes studies, microbial ecology, environmental toxicology, quantitative & modeling biology, computational ecology, pest management, environmental monitoring, conservation biology, biodiversity, environmental studies, natural resources and fisheries management, and limnology.

Adding research data is a potential step for this subject collection. For guidelines, please see MSU's Digital Research Data Collection Development Policy.

Open Access research and scholarship is becoming more visible, relevant, and important to the scientific process as a whole. Given the current political climate, this will likely continue, as new federal directives regarding mandatory OA publishing for federal grants are put into place over the next several years. To this end, new Open Access Transformative Agreemenets, Subscribe To Open, and other OA initiatives are encouraged and actively pursued. This is strongly inline with the broader Open Science agenda, which includes Open Data (including data housed under FAIR and CARE principles), Open Source, Open Peer Review, and Open Educational Resources. These trends should also be considered in collection activities, as they will likely impact the collections in coming years.