Stephen Francoeur's Commonplace Book

Pull quote: “‘One thing is for sure, [Heather] Joseph told PW, ‘the nature of the conversation on the [public access] issue has changed. The RWA debacle has helped to engage researchers on this issue in droves, so we’re seeing a more substantive discussion of how opening up access to this information helps scientists do their work.’”

Pull quote: “We see this sense of panic manifest in several ways. When Oxford University Press tries to claim that essays written for edited volumes are ‘work made for hire,’ they are grasping at a legal straw that cannot hold up for them. Likewise when publishers like Elsevier and the American Chemical Society write publication contracts that try to make authors’ retention of rights, or not, dependent on the kinds of internal policies that exist on the authors’ university campuses. Such contracts are more cries of anger and fear than legal agreements. In all of these cases, the publishers are looking for a legal lever they can push that will stave off irrelevance. But the law does not work that way in general, and copyright is written to benefit authors and give them control over their works, not to prop up a particular business model.”

Pull quote: “However, in those first two weeks, we went through over a quarter of the tokens we’d purchased, tokens that were supposed to last us a full calendar year. Apparently Google, Google Scholar, and the DOIs in scientific citation styles lead enough students to the Wiley publisher website version of these articles that going purely pay-per-view would crush our serials budget.”

Pull quote: “Resistance is not, in itself, a bad thing, though it certainly can derail initiatives if not managed well. Resistance can help you hone your idea into something that will be successful. Your idea may require significant tweaking, but if your colleagues didn’t resist your idea as it was, you’d never have known that. It’s far better to encounter resistance and deal with it than to have your colleagues passively accept your ideas even if they don’t think they’re great. The latter is far more likely to derail successful change.”

Pull quote: “Publishers have contempt for the authors they need to write works, and the readers they need to read works. Publishers are scared that the internet is going to disintermediate their asses into the dustbin of history, and the best response that many of them have come up with is to express their fear through hatred.”

Pull quote: “Everything about the way that the scholarly literature is organized is based on the journal, the discipline and the scholarly community that connects those two things. Expecting first-years to get that from the outside is ridiculous. Expecting first years to get that because they’re taught about it by graduate students who are just becoming conversant with their own discourse community is ridiculous. And expecting first years to get that because they spend 50 minutes with a librarian is ridiculous.”

Pull quote: Libraries are examples of spaces dominated by noncommercial values, a semi-permeable membrane between the market for books and the democratic need for a knowledge commons. A noncommercial ethic can coexist alongside markets, and all can thrive. But public goods and noncommercial spaces can’t coexist with a market fundamentalism that believes all public goods and noncommercial spaces are evil, at least not if that market fundamentalism controls the laws. The more or less successful drive to extend intellectual property rights into perpetuity and to wither the public domain into nonexistence is a good indication that the ethic motivating libraries isn’t winning many political battles.”

Pull quote: “Ebooks are curb cuts for libraries. For those of us struggling financially, or wiped out after an long day without the time or transportation to get to the local library, or physically disabled and unable to easily move around, being able to take advantage of the tremendous convenience of downloading a book onto a e-reader or mobile phone literally means the difference between reading and not reading. And I realized by the end of the week that this purposeful denial of equal access is what infuriates me most about the actions of publishers against libraries. At the moment when we have the opportunity to improve the lives of many of our neighbors, publishers concern themselves with competitive positioning and an appropriate amount of ‘friction’ in library access.”

Pull quote: “

So, ebooks in public libraries, open access to publicly funded scholarship, quality, properly funded public transit. It’s all the same.

Private interests are attacking the public good. Let’s stop them.”

Pull quote: “Like it or not, legislation is often written by lawyers - both Congresscritters and legal people on their staffs - and lawyers often testify to Congress about bills that are under consideration. If more of the legal community can be motivated to understand and oppose bad legislation, particularly in an era when too many in Congress freely admit they don’t use and don’t understand the Internet, then this sort of advocacy is sorely needed.”