I’m still thinking through a short article for a local journal on classroom access to published scholarship. One of the odder conclusions I’m coming to is that I ought to thank some of the higher-handed players in this game (*cough*AAP*cough*), just for making the publication machine visible.
The eternal academic-librarian plaint is that faculty don’t see what their librarians do for them. They look for material, and lo! there is material. They want something on reserve, and lo! it shows up on the reserve shelves. They want expensive journals, and lo! they get them. (Mostly. Less so these days. Again, the machine is becoming visible, and faculty are discovering they don’t like what they see, ’ware PDF.)
Right now, though, they’re asking for materials to be put on e-reserve, because they and their students love the convenience, and lo! they are suddenly being refused because the AAP is poking its nose into the e-reserves system to find out how more money can be squeezed out of libraries.
(By the way, I may have mistakenly said on CavLec previously that the AAP was suing UCSD. They aren’t, as of this writing. They’re just sending nasty lawyer letters at present. One of these moments I’ll do a CavLec search and issue any necessary corrections.)
If I were an AAP strategist, which I’m emphatically not, I’d have told the lawyers to go slow on this one. That the lawyers are going quite slowly suggests to me that somewhere an AAP strategist has had the same thought I’ve had: faculty are a slumbering behemoth right now, because they don’t know how they get access to materials; they just know that materials are there when they need them. Interrupt that, and the behemoth could well awaken and trample the AAP underfoot.
I get the sense that the AAP is actually feeling fairly encouraged on the open-access front. For all the noise coming from librarians, the faculty behemoth really hasn’t stirred much. We lost big on the NIH proposal, surveys show faculty support for open access is lukewarm at best, and nobody’s beating down my door to deposit materials in the repository.
Why? Because faculty don’t feel the pinch. When they want e-access to an article, it’s usually there, and if it isn’t, they can comfortably attribute its absence to those darn libraries, when are they going to digitize everything already? (Never mind that we mostly aren’t in the article-digitization business. Faculty don’t know that.) Faculty don’t see the firewalls. They don’t realize how easy it is for a database provider to yank access. And all this wonderful e-access has happened with zero additional effort or expense from faculty; journals, database providers, and libraries have Just Done It. So why should faculty bother investigating the supply-chain?
Until the supply-chain breaks, loudly and visibly. As the AAP is threatening to break e-reserves. Thanks, AAP—we needed you to do that. Honestly, I mean it—thank you.
What we will do about it, if we’re smart, is refuse to curtain the machine this time. We’ve curtained it before; we’ve done everything in our power to keep the for-profit takeover of scholarly publishing from hurting faculty access to research materials. Unfortunately, this meant shooting a huge dose of tranquilizers into the behemoth, and now we’re worse off than ever.
Not this time. This time, we call out the AAP behind the curtain. This time, we look faculty in the eye and say, calmly, “No, we can’t put this on e-reserve, because fair-use is endangered everywhere and the AAP is making lawsuit noises—but why don’t you and I contact the article authors and ask if they’ll post a preprint we can link to? And by the way, are you posting your own preprints for others? We have this repository…”
We have to draw a thick black line connecting what faculty do and what they have access to, because right now they don’t see it. That’s how we awaken the slumbering behemoth.
And that’s why I need to sit myself down and write that article.