Why I am the enemy
Well, drat. Here I go wanting to spin a little mystery around the book chapter I wrote for Rachel Singer Gordon, in which it is explained why I consider myself the enemy of right-thinking for-profit publishers everywhere, and Roy Tennant goes and spoils it:
Described as the “canary in the coal mine” by one university administrator, academic libraries can draw perhaps some small solace from the description of university presses as “code blue.” As someone who has worked with our university press to enable new forms of publication and scholarship, I took this as inspiration to redouble our efforts to capitalize on the opportunities offered by a robust and ubiquitous network and effective software applications to recreate scholarly publishing.
This is why I am the enemy. I am not the enemy just because I’m an academic librarian. I am not the enemy just because I run an institutional repository. I am not the enemy just because I pay attention to scholarly publishing and data curation and preservation. I am not the enemy because I’m going to stop subscribing to journals—I don’t even make those decisions!
I am the enemy because I will become a publisher. Not just “can” become, will become. And I’ll do it without letting go of librarianship, its mission and its ethics—and publishers may think they have my mission and my ethics, but they’re often wrong. Think I can’t compete? Watch me cut off your air supply over the course of my career (and I have 30-odd years to go, folks; don’t think you’re getting rid of me in any hurry). Just watch.
I could reprise what I wrote for Rachel about why I think this, but that really would spoil the chapter, and I don’t want to do that. I am fuming, however, at the slow pace of book publishing right now (though that isn’t Rachel’s fault). I’m starting to think that books are too slow for anything that belongs in a conversation, as this topic assuredly does. If we’d just get over our weird print-privilege hangups…
Anyway.
There’s been a bit of a dust-up between Jan Velterop and Stevan Harnad over (you guessed, right?) green versus gold open access. I’m going to break a streak here and say that Harnad is right and Velterop wrong. Researchers do not have nearly the duty to journals qua journals that they do to their own careers and the wider dissemination of knowledge, and they have absolutely zero duty to journal publishers. Who serves whom here?
The problem with Velterop’s argument, to my mind at least, is that it presumes that breaking up the current journal-publishing system while we work on something else is a near-fatal blow to the scholarly-publishing mission. I find that a ludicrous notion. We’re smart people, here in libraries, and the researchers we serve aren’t stupid either. If and when Elseviley Verlag breaks up, we’ll find a way (probably many ways) to pick up the slack. In my meaner moments, I rather suspect this argument gets trotted out because nobody wants us to realize that Elseviley Verlag doesn’t contribute as much as they’d like us to believe.
About which, see above about me becoming a publisher-librarian. It’ll happen. I daresay I’ll even be good at it. And yes, Elseviley Verlag should fear me and my kind. If nothing else, we can’t be any slower than the current system!