And while I’m being cranky
What the heck is this? Seriously, what? Did somebody over at Castle Ariadne prick a finger on a spinning-wheel such that the entire editorial board fell asleep?
It’s abominably cutesy. I’m looking for Umbridge’s pink kittens gamboling on china, I truly am. Unless you’re either in the biz or a Ph.D-level subtext decipherer, it’s hard to find any actual content in it. I can’t imagine either of these people normally writes this way for a professional audience. So what gives? Why have they suddenly gone all Bulwer-Lytton-contest on us?
Because they’re scared, that’s why. There. I’ve blown everyone’s cover, including my own.
Look. The elephant in the closet is that institutional repositories are in trouble. They haven’t done what everybody thought they were going to do, which was attract lots of shiny happy faculty managing all their shiny happy peer-reviewed content such that we could finally tell big-pig publishers to take their ridiculous journal pricing and shove it somewhere painful.
It didn’t work, okay? And it shows no signs of tipping into a workable state. That’s a damn scary thing to say, if you’re a repository-rat. So I understand the sudden submergence in cutesy metaphor, I really do; it’s a subliminal distress signal for those in the know that doesn’t ring alarm bells elsewhere. It’s hard to be the kid in the crowd yelling about the emperor’s nudity; emperors execute people. I’m not happy at the notion of fingers of blame jabbing in my general direction, never mind my job evaporating. Perhaps self-indulgently, I don’t think the mess institutional repositories find themselves in is my fault!
But how are we going to make any progress if we don’t first acknowledge the problem, openly and publicly and with appropriate systems analysis and without obfuscatory metaphor? How?
This is why I am writing Roach Motel. Nobody else is. Everybody else is drawing gamboling pink china kittens.