I hate writing in formal-publication register. I tend not to like reading it, either, but writing it, I now realize, just gives me fits.
I spent some of yesterday getting started on my paper for HigherEdBlogCon. Collected some supporting material, got an outline together, then hit the damnedest case of writer’s block you’ve ever seen. Just could not force a single sentence out of myself.
Well, so word by word I slogged through a few introductory paragraphs, and then had to go to meetings and do other stuff. Came back, and suddenly started writing fluently—and then had to make. myself. stop. because it was all in blog register, and that just won’t do.
Bah. It’s not that I don’t know how. I’ve been writing papers half my bloody life, and a few of them were even good. But I’ve never done that sort of writing fluently. It’s always been a halting, fits-and-starts genre for me, whereas I can toss off a thousand words on CavLec without a blink. (TextWrangler says that yesterday’s grump about attracting material to IRs ran to 985 words.)
It’s probably something I need to work on. I read Richard Poynder’s latest, and while it was mostly even-handed, the end got me spitting mad—essentially, the die-hard OA fanatics like Harnad (and, apparently, Poynder) want to jettison the librarian contribution to OA because we librarians just aren’t fanatic enough.
This frustrates me about Harnad, and I hate like poison to see someone of Poynder’s stature repeating it. Just because OA isn’t the only thing I do doesn’t mean I don’t do OA! If OA pre- and postprints make their way into the IR I run, what the hell does Stevan Harnad or anydamnbody else care what else is in there? If we want to preserve as well as collect OA materials, why on earth is that a bad thing? If we experiment with publishing and digitization as well as self-archiving, what’s the damage, damn it?
And if self-archiving is such a lovely damn solution to everybody’s problems, why isn’t everybody doing it? You can’t pin that one on us! (And Poynder, to his credit, didn’t try.) The world is more complicated than Harnad would like it to be. I’m coping with that, thank you; I’d like to spend my entire life pushing OA, sure, but I have to do little things like keep my job and keep my IR viable (despite craptastic self-archiving rates) so that I can keep pushing OA. Harnad, on the other hand, isn’t coping. Poynder doesn’t seem to be either. Spoilt children, demanding that the librarians play with them to the exclusion of all else.
I loved the bit where “publishers are handling the article archiving, so OA doesn’t have to worry about digital preservation!” That’s arrant nonsense. First of all, we’re trusting publishers to keep materials available long-term? The same publishers who are locking it up to begin with? Yeah, that makes sense.
Second, this attitude is stunningly ahistorical. Publishers have never been involved with preservation; it’s been a library function as long as there have been libraries. We had to drag those yobbos kicking and screaming into the acid-free-paper age. We’d have to be bloody stupid to think they’ll solve digital preservation. We’re doing a better job of that in libraries even now.
I confidently predict that if Harnad and Poynder kill all the librarians, OA will founder. Like it or not (and they obviously don’t!), the librarians are OA’s sixth column. University IT isn’t going to pick up the slack (as Poynder suggests they might); university IT doesn’t understand the need, and will be far less patient with crappy no-mandate self-archiving response rates than libraries are. Nor they won’t evangelize the way I do, neither.
I suppose I just don’t understand why, when presented with librarians’ broader sense of the world and understandable confusion, the response from Harnad et alia is to write us and our IRs off completely. It’s a very strange response. That kind of thing may make sense in politics (“if you’re not 100% with me, screw you!”), but I should think a nascent grassroots movement like OA needs all the allies it can get. Would it be so hard to acknowledge our concerns? Respond to them? Help us resolve them?
(Maybe it is. “Self-archiving or nothing!” seems to be the battle cry. If that’s the case, then I guess I really don’t belong in that world, because I don’t think self-archiving is the one answer—I don’t think there’s any one answer.)
Sure, there’s stupid stuff happening. (I was flatly disgusted to learn that MIT is selling ETDs. Grow up and get with it, y’all! You owe your students better than that; they paid you to launch them in their careers, so you owe them every jot and tittle of citation impact their dissertations can muster.) Sure, we librarians can be discursive and difficult. We dilute the message sometimes. We have other things to do besides OA. And a significant number of us aren’t doing a sterling job with the IRs we’re running; I’m the first to admit that.
So now you hate us and want us to go away? WTF? Where, to paraphrase Harnad at DASER, does OA think it’s gonna find another sucker? Why are you throwing people like me out with the bathwater? Work with me, not against me. For $DEITY’s sake don’t undercut me and my efforts; you’re only slashing your own throats thereby. I’m only a peasant, but isn’t a peasant better than nothing? And isn’t part of my time and effort worth more to OA than none of it?
Because, damn, I can just see myself approaching faculty with my best smile and my OA speech, only to be received with “Harnad and Poynder say IRs are useless and librarians are confused idiots.” Yeah. That helps everybody, that does.
The danger of losing librarians like me—not to mention existing IRs run by libraries or library consortia—is real. I have other possible niches within librarianship; seven months into my job, I’ve already gotten one or two tentative “thinking of moving?” feelers from other organizations. I chose this niche with glee because I believe in it; I used to work (indirectly) for bloated journal publishers, and I want no part of the for-profit racket. Information to the people! That’s what I do, and I’m proud of it.
But I can jump ship. Done it before. If I start to think that the IR tide is turning against OA, then I can move back into more classical digital-library stuff; it’s where my base expertise is anyhow. I wouldn’t necessarily like that; I may not be an OA Archivangelist, but I do consider myself a small-e OA evangelist. Like or no like, though, I can jump—and if Harnad and Poynder get their way and kick OA out of academic libraries and their IRs, I won’t have much choice, will I?
Ugh. Sorry. Major tangent. I was angry. Still am.
But if I were more fluent with the publication-quality writing register, I’d have a real response to Poynder ready instead of just a blog rant. Sigh. Must keep working on writing all formal-like, or M-ch–l G-rm-n wins.
(Peter, I know this one’s relevant, but please don’t repost it to OA News. It’s even more petulant than my usual run, and I’m not proud of that.)
