Out of my bubble
It’s easy to read the statistics. X percentage of research faculty think open access is a neat idea. Y would be willing to post their research materials. Z think they ought to keep their own copyrights.
What’s not easy is smacking one’s nose into not-X, not-Y, and not-Z. What’s not easy is realizing that even among X, Y, and Z, these questions are purely theoretical for most. Sure, they think it’s a nice idea; doesn’t mean they’re aware or willing enough to do anything about it.
I knew I’d need a soapbox. I knew I’d need to evangelize. I honestly didn’t realize how much, not deep in my gut where most of my actual thinking takes place. I live in the middle of open-access evangelism. I read Peter Suber every day. My biggest del.icio.us category (well, apart from “css”) contains open-access linkage. With all this talk floating around out there, how could faculty be ignorant? Surely they’ve seen something.
Then I went to a meeting where open access was confused with open source (my fault, that), where folks were concerned that open access would reduce awareness, where they worried (not entirely without justification this time) that e-publication reduced scholarly cachet.
Oh, my. I have got a lot of education to do.
The hard part is figuring out how to do it. The usual route for information dissemination to faculty—through our liaison librarians—doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, as their typical interactions with faculty don’t offer many opportunities to mention open-access issues. This may change, if publishers sue more universities over e-reserves: “no, you can’t use this link to a proprietary database any more, but you could contact the author and ask if they’ll post the article to a repository…” Given the cost and the annoyance of the lawsuits, though, this isn’t an outcome I’m especially hoping for!
I’m not panicking. The Evil Master Plan actually is proceeding reasonably apace, with one faculty visit definite for next month, and another likely. I’m working on squibs, handouts, an article for a local journal.
The scales have fallen from my eyes, however. This is going to be an uphill climb.