Caveat Lector

I’m shocked that nobody is calling me names. Instead, a productive discussion is starting about open access to the library literature.

This makes me happy. One of the hard parts of my job is that other librarians—even other librarians at MPOW, sometimes—don’t really understand what I do or why they should support it. Most of the library literature about open access talks about open access vis-à-vis “faculty.”

Faculty or not (some of us are, some aren’t, some are somewhere in-between like me, and I’m not getting anywhere near that discussion right now, thanks), the costs and benefits of open access apply to us librarians too. We certainly have overpriced journals and trade publications. We certainly have journals that sold out and saw their prices soar. We certainly have journals and trade publications that ask us to sign ridiculous copyright-transfer agreements.

We certainly have a large disenfranchised constituency of librarians too resource-starved to read our subscription journals or attend our conferences; that’s why my unindicted co-conspirators and I are doing Five Weeks to a Social Library. The History Librarian points out quite correctly that the disenfranchised are disproportionately public librarians, such that there is a disconnect between available open access resources (which are mostly geared toward academic libraries) and those who most need their resources to be open access.

I don’t know if I’m as exercised about this as the History Librarian, though. I could be wrong (and welcome correction), but I don’t think the interesting stuff specific to public librarians is showing up in the formal library literature, especially since public librarians have much less of an onus to publish compared to academic librarians. I think the lion’s share of good stuff for public librarians is showing up on blogs and wikis and listservs and webliographies, all of which are open to any librarian with an Internet connection.

That said, public libraries and academic libraries aren’t so far apart as all that, so I do think there’s value to public librarians in opening up what we can of the formal literature. I just think there’s more value for us, in the long run—it’s called “eating our own dog food.” We can’t reasonably go out and evangelize self-archiving to faculty when we aren’t doing it ourselves. We can’t evangelize open-access journals when we don’t publish in them. We can’t evangelize open-access search engines and materials if we don’t use them. In other words, if you make a point of paying attention to open access, you’re helping me revamp the publication system (as well as keep my job), and I appreciate it.

I mean, our very own guidebooks militate against open access! I was reading the publication chapter in The Successful Academic Librarian last week (ambitious, that’s me) when I ran smack into (paraphrased) “There are open-access journals, but they aren’t well-known, so most librarians consider them dubious publication outlets at best.” Oh, great; thanks ever so, O Molder of the Mind of the Young. That isn’t even true, for $DEITY’s sake! Find me a techie librarian who doesn’t know about D-Lib and Ariadne. One.

So what is a librarian who publishes in the library literature to do? At a minimum, I suggest the following:

• Read all copyright transfer agreements. It’s flat-out irresponsible not to. If you don’t like what you’re reading, ask if that’s the only agreement available, and be prepared to detail your concerns.
• For those agreements that do not appear to allow self-archiving or do not address self-archiving, ask the editor “May I self-archive this paper?” Editors and publishers need to hear that their authors want to do this; we mustn’t let publishers hide behind “but our authors don’t care!” Just asking the question is not going to kill your acceptance chances (especially if you ask this after your paper is accepted!).
• Whenever possible, submit your work to an existing open-access journal. Gold-OA has a chicken-and-egg problem; authors won’t submit to OA journals unless other authors do, and Molders of the Minds of the Young won’t give credence to OA journals until they know people (good people!) who publish in them. We don’t necessarily need to start more OA library journals. We need to utilize the ones we do have fully. (That said… watch this space.)
• Know OA resources in our field. Use them, and point other librarians to them. I’m at DLIST all the time these days.

Want to go a little further? There are ways.

• Look up your publisher on SHERPA/ROMEO. If they’re not some kind of green, ask them why not. If they don’t appear (hello, Information Today, where are you? though I should mention that I have a book chapter in press with them, and my contract permitted self-archiving without my having to ask), ask them why not.
• Get accounts on DLIST and/or E-LIS and your local IR if you’re lucky enough to have one. Use them. Self-archiving is easy. I do it, and I’m not all that bright.
• Get familiar with the SPARC Author’s Addendum. When the occasion seems to warrant, use it.
• Avoid publishers who aren’t playing nice. Elsevier’s lobbying against FRPAA. Emerald is reputed to have bought some journals and jacked up their prices (can anyone confirm? I haven’t been in the field long enough to know). Be open about what you’re doing and why; peer education is a good thing.
• Ask your colleagues to self-archive their stuff. “Hey, I heard you wrote X; mind putting it in DLIST where I can see it?” This goes for conference presentations too; they’re becoming increasingly important.

And if you’re full-on gonzo rebellious, by all means start your own OA journal. (As I said, watch this space.) I got Open Journal Systems running, and I’m not all that bright. It’ll install on a lot of cheap webhosting plans, since it runs off PHP and MySQL. (Hey, maybe Blake could be convinced to offer it. Combined with DLIST or E-LIS for preservation, that would be as bulletproof a publishing solution as any.)

If we care enough, and we should, we who publish in the library literature can make sure all our colleagues have access to everything we write. If not us, who? If not now, when?