Pull quote: “For Brooklyn College’s Faculty Day Conference this week, a few colleagues and I made a poster illustrating just that predatory behavior and introducing open access as an alternative. But we didn’t make the poster for in-house use only! No, we want to share the files with you. Change them a little or a lot and use them for your educational campaigns about open access!”
Pull quote: “The unanimous vote of the faculty senate makes UCSF the largest scientific institution in the nation to adopt an open-access policy and among the first public universities to do so.”
Pull quote: “‘The adoption of this policy will allow librarians here to gain first-hand knowledge of how facets of open access work, which will greatly improve our outreach efforts to faculty on campus,’ said Jen Waller, interdisciplinary research librarian and chair of the Libraries’ Scholarly Communication Working Group.”
Pull quote: “It is very important that the MLA, one of the oldest and largest scholarly societies in the U.S., is taking notice of the changes that are happening in scholarly communications. As with the faculty open access conversations, this is evidence that change is penetrating the academy broadly and deeply. The revolution in scholarly communications will not, in the end, by accomplished by librarians; it will be accomplished by scholars, authors and their scholarly societies. That those groups are beginning to notice the need for change and to engage in the debates about how to accomplish it is a significant step forward.”
Pull quote: “[W]hat’s to prevent a journal from closing access to content that had previously been open? Again, I’m honestly not sure. I mean, PLoS is unlikely to suddenly make a deal with, say, Wiley and start charging $3000/year for access to its backfiles, but that’s because PLoS has staked its reputation on being an open access journal (and a damn fine one, too). For the other journals, the ones who went out on a limb and honestly weren’t sure if they could make it work — what of them? What if, like RUSA, they decide their experiment isn’t working, for whatever reason, and they need to close access — what, other than the ethics of their editorial boards and the boards of their sponsoring organizations — prevents them from closing access, not just moving forward, but to previously open content?”
Pull quote: “But it’s something I’ve gone through now. I have a better idea on process and I’m more comfortable asking in the initial inquiries, making it clear that this is a requirement for me before I submit even a proposal.”
Pull quote: “She wishes, however, that RUSQ’s editors and supporters would come clean. Open access has a history of paying a good bit too much heed to rose-tinted glasses. It’s important to get mistakes and failures out there for examination, uncomfortable though that process often is (not least because a few open-access advocates sling blame around with hurricane-force winds, and just as indiscriminately).”
Pull quote: “Earlier this week, Yale university student, Emmanuel Quartey, posted a video interview with the school’s librarian, Susan Gibbons, in which he asked her about open access publishing. Her response was far more ambivalent than the Harvard faculty council’s. Though she noted that open-access journals are more accessible, she worried that asking younger faculty to publish in open-access (presumably less prestigious) journals could jeopardize their chances to attain tenure. In essence, prestige would stay put but tenure would move away from younger Yale professors. So, the library would continue to support both open and closed-access journals.”
Pull quote: “In sum, publication-based assignments emphasize the responsibilities of public discourse and build learner accountability. Librarians have concrete responsibilities and opportunities on this front. We are well positioned to encourage the dissemination of student work in open forums, many of which we are intimately acquainted with and/or directly responsible for. We can identify and pursue these prospects with faculty and students and collaborate to ensure the best possible realization, and in so doing become more critically and holistically involved in the learning experience of our user communities.”
Pull quote: “The deal here is that Open Access is not a fringe issue any more. It’s not just something that idealistic young researchers like to shout about. It’s a major part of the strategy of one — several, actually — of the world’s top universities. I’d argue that it’s been a moral imperative for a long time. Now Open Access has become an economic imperative, too.”
Pull quote: “Everything’s in flux, markets are rearranging. But I think I sense a general swing of the pendulum back to per-use fees, interestingly sometimes this is what libraries want and sometimes it’s what libraries resist, and some for publishers and aggregators. In general, per-use charging, just like flat rate charging, may or may not be sustainable for library customers, it of course depends on the pricing.”
Pull quote: “Refusing these ‘untenable’ conditions will bring pain to the users and the librarians, who must deal with declining collections and frustrated clients. But like those who fought the untenable labor conditions of manufacturing, farming, and transportation, we are beginning to see that uniting our efforts against the unsustainable practices of those who control the the capital of scholarly communication will stabilize the delicate balance of powers and enable the progress of knowledge.”
Pull quote: “The most astonishing thing about this is not so much that it goes on, but that people have put up with it for so long. Talk to university librarians about extortionist journal subscriptions and mostly all you will get is a pained shrug. The librarians know it’s a racket, but they feel powerless to act because if they refused to pay the monopoly rents then their academics – who, after all, are under the cosh of publish-or-perish mandates – would react furiously (and vituperatively).”
Pull quote: “In a frank open letter to the Harvard faculty, the council warns that the library faces a subscription crisis ‘exacerbated by efforts of certain publishers’ to bundle journals into high-priced packages. The letter does not name those publishers but says that Harvard now pays almost $3.75-million a year for their journals. ‘Continuing these subscriptions on their current footing is financially untenable,’ the council says.”
Pull quote: “So Harvard’s ‘no, we can’t’ carries a significant subtext: no amount of money, even from one of the richest universities in the world, can satisfy the rapacity of the current system. To the Loon, this has been obvious for years: whatever amount of money a library has, the big-pigs invariably find a way to vacuum it up, so increasing money flow to the library merely increases the big-pigs’ profits without buying much if any additional benefit to libraries or library patrons.”
