Caveat Lector

The estimable Open Access News pointed yesterday to a modest proposal for library financial support to open-access journals.

What didn’t get mentioned, but is clear if you follow the discussion-list thread, is that the proposal got shot down pretty quickly. Why, folks rather intelligently started to ask, would a library voluntarily give scarce budget resources to a resource that will exist whether the library donates or not?

Libraries are public-spirited institutions, is one answer that didn’t get put forward but should have. Let’s leave that aside, however, because it is true that with serials budgets in the state they’re in, voluntary support will be a terribly hard sell.

My suspicion is that libraries will end up contributing in-kind support, rather than money, to non-profit publications. Let’s face it: libraries are building digital-library projects great guns. They’re developing skillsets that publications need. Why hire out (which is what most serials do), when a library can take on the project for free?

Non-profits that use publication dollars to subsidize their other operations won’t find this much of a help. Screw ’em, say I. Why should libraries be subsidizing non-publication efforts? (Which is, I need not say, exactly what’s happening now.) But libraries can, should, and (I still believe) will help with production, metadata, and archival.

It’s a win-win. Libraries meet their goal of affordably making and keeping knowledge available. Non-profit societies get their publications out. And nobody has to worry about the free-rider problem.