The respectable T. Scott wishes librarians (among other OA advocates) would stop hitting out at scholarly societies:
Finally, I believe that the open access partisans, along with many of my librarian colleagues, have made a serious tactical mistake in placing ourselves in such unyielding opposition to the scientific societies. Those societies that have maintained their publishing programs as low-cost independent entities should be applauded by librarians, even when we disagree on the open access issues. The day that Marty Frank sells the APS publishing program to Elsevier because he doesn’t think he can successfully keep it alive on its own anymore is a day when we all lose.
I want to take this piece by piece.
To begin with, I don’t know many librarians who have expressed a specific stance about all scholarly societies, and especially not the subgroup of societies described above. In fact, I don’t know any; I’d appreciate some pointers. When I hit out at publishers on CavLec, for example, I typically use the coinage “Elseviley Verlag,” an amalgamation of the for-profit, non-scholarly-society publishers Elsevier, Wiley & Sons, and Springer Verlag. That coinage specifically excludes societies going it alone.
That said, I’m honestly hard-pressed to say that academic librarians as a whole should be well-disposed to scholarly societies as a whole. Scientific societies in particular have squandered a lot of library goodwill by roundly ignoring thirty years or more of the serials crisis. If they now want libraries to take their worries about open access seriously, they have some ground to make up.
Elseviley Verlag didn’t corner the journal market by building it. Elseviley Verlag cornered the journal market because a lot of societies sold out to them. They either didn’t notice or didn’t care that they were putting libraries over a barrel in the process. So (to be blunt and callous about it, more callous than I actually am) we should care that open access is putting them over a barrel why, exactly?
Moreover, when scholarly societies still in possession of publishing arms range themselves against FRPAA and other open-access initiatives, they’re getting in bed with Elsevier’s lobbyists as well as certain dubious sockpuppets. Color me unimpressed, especially since Elseviley Verlag’s Big Deal tactics have been responsible for squeezing society publishers as well as libraries out of plenty of money. Lie down with dogs…
I may be alone in this, but I’m also irked by one specific phrase I see in scholarly publishers’ contributions to the open-access debate: “subscription-funded activities.” I’ll make my stance as clear as I know how: libraries are not responsible for supporting society activities unrelated to the scholarly literature. Too many societies are treating subscription revenue not as fee-for-service, but as an entitlement. It’s not. If libraries can get the scholarly literature properly managed and disseminated in a more cost-effective fashion than the current system, we are right to pursue that; that’s our mission. I am entirely unmoved when I see societies getting upset about their “other subscription-funded activities.” Their other subscription-funded activities are fundamentally not my problem; nor is it my problem that societies placed all their financial eggs in the subscription basket.
If my stance, in T. Scott’s phrase, amounts to “placing [myself] in unyielding opposition to the scientific societies,” so be it. I don’t think it is; I think it no more than a reality check.
If scholarly societies can look beyond the actual cash libraries provide them, though, I think they will find that libraries have a lot of in-kind support to offer, and I’m saddened not to see that entering the discussion. A society that partners with a library to digitize and preserve back issues of its journal will likely require considerably less revenue to fund the digitization, and can offload preservation responsibilities entirely. A society that lets a library host its e-journal—current issues, back issues, any issues—may see a lot of its revenue needs associated with that journal fade into thin air. This is not pie-in-the-sky posturing. It’s possible now; several libraries are ready to take journals on board, and several larger libraries have digitization or publishing-services arms. So why aren’t societies beating down our doors? Why would the APS even consider selling to Elsevier, when it could partner with a library?
(In passing, much current discussion about “publishing cooperatives” bypasses libraries entirely. It’s stupid to overlook us, stupid to think of us merely as sources of cash. Academic libraries have all kinds of experience in the digital realm. We know how publishing works, too—admittedly, some of us more than others. We don’t just have money; we have infrastructure and expertise that should be factored into the equation. For more from me along these lines, wait for Rachel Singer Gordon’s upcoming essay collection Information Tomorrow.)
Finally, I think there’s a straw man lurking as regards scholarly societies that have not yet sold out, and still provide their wares at reasonable prices. They’re not the problem and never were. Nor, I think, are librarians in general averse to subscribing to their journals. To them I say: the open-access movement is not about you right now, so don’t panic. In the short- to medium-term, I honestly don’t care whether they go gold-OA or not.
I do care—I care a lot—when leaders of these societies oppose FRPAA, spread FUD and outright lies about open access (a quick skim of Open Access News provides quite a few examples of this), refuse to promote green-road OA to their memberships, ignore libraries and library concerns, and—worst of all—refuse to realize that letting open access take Elseviley Verlag down a peg or two is probably in their best interest, since Elseviley Verlag is substantially why libraries have had to cancel their subscriptions. There, if you will, is a “serious tactical mistake,” and not by libraries.
When the FUD stops, and when societies are ready to talk seriously to libraries about what we can offer besides wagonloads of cash, then I will be much readier to help societies with their legitimate concerns about the transition to open access.
