Librarian fangirl post
I want to meet Barbara Quint. Been reading her stuff for a while now, and she rocks my socks. (Via Open Access News, as usual.)
(And, yes, my fangirlishness probably has a lot to do with Quint’s rhetorical style and let’s-get-out-there-and-DO-something enthusiasm matching up rather closely with mine. Doesn’t bother me; I’ll fangirl where I want to.)
I agree with every single word, including that librarians need to buck up to the reality of becoming publishers. It’s in the cards. Let’s get in front of it.
Because, really, there’s a hole in the Open Access movement that nobody I’ve seen has addressed yet. Back in the day, we had a fairly sustainable publishing model—scholarly-society publishing. What happened to it? It got bought out. Journal by journal, year by year, the profitmongers bought the societies’ publications out, took them private, jacked up their prices.
Open-access scholarly publishing (leaving aside self-archiving for the moment) doesn’t appear to have poison-pill anti-buyout mechanisms. Some stuff is open access now, but will it stay that way?
It will if it’s controlled by librarians. That’s just the way librarians think and work. Some of my SLISmates laugh at the “indoctrination” into library ethics and values, but this is one clear case where librarians have a major edge over even scholarly societies—we are damn, damn hesitant to let ourselves be bought out.
Think I’m kidding? Ask OCLC, which is regarded with intense suspicion by the very libraries and librarians it serves. When they screw things up (and they do, witness that amazingly wrongheaded lawsuit over the Dewey Decimal System last year), they can expect to hear about it. When they open things up, though (as they’re doing with WorldCat), they are—cautiously; librarians are terribly cautious—praised for it.
Let’s face it, serials librarians. The only way we’re going to keep access to the serials we want in the long-term is to damned well publish them ourselves, or at the very least credibly threaten to. We can do it. What’s more, we have to. The scholarly societies and the for-profits have pretty much struck out. Our turn now.