Caveat Lector

I have referred to university faculty and academic administrators, none too kindly, as the slumbering behemoth as regards the march of open access.

Change is. (Is it ever. The slides for the scholarly-communication talk I gave as recently as April? Are utterly obsolete and need to be reworked. So it goes.) The behemoth is starting to yawn, stretch, and bestir itself.

I’m quite pleased and proud that one of the authors of the ACLS draft report on humanities and social-science cyberinfrastructure is from MPOW. (I’m trying to inveigle him into helping me with a brown-bag series, but no luck yet; he’s a busy man.) Recommended measure number two from the report: “Develop public and institutional policies that foster openness and access.” I can’t argue with that. Wish they’d fix the punctuation, though—em dashes and smart quotes seem to have dropped out of the PDF. Font-embedding problem, maybe?

And then we’ve got twenty-five provosts tossing a gauntlet (PDF) over FRPAA. That’s huge, stunningly huge; we’ve had libraries and the occasional faculty senate make their voices heard in the past, but this is Big Admin and it just cannot be ignored. (It contains a lot of the usual suspects, actually: California, Dartmouth, Purdue. But where are MIT and Cornell, I wonder?) I fear I can only look wistfully on from the sidelines, as when I brought this up with MPOW’s provost he only shrugged, but who knows? When there’s leadership, others may follow. There’s another meet-and-greet with the provost in a month; it’s in my calendar!

Interesting times. Interesting times. I do like what I do.