This OA Librarian represents!
I just laid a major smackdown in a reply to a post on the SPARC/ARL mailing list. It was impolitic, I shouldn’t have done it, and I’ll take the lumps I’ve got coming for it. But people (especially librarians, as this individual was!) who get in my face (of all faces, mine!) with condescending know-it-all lectures about what libraries and librarians (and, it is loftily implied, my peasant self in particular) should know about and do for open access—these people really hack me off. They hack me off to the point of laying return smackdowns when they betray a serious lack of awareness about and respect for what libraries and librarians already do for OA.
And that is in large part why I ranted as loudly as I did about the notable absence of librarianship from the Chandos open access book. Leaving libraries out of the picture is insulting, and it’s practically universal (The Access Principle is just as bad as the Chandos book), and it causes real librarians, librarians like me who have staked our careers on OA and are working our butts off for it, real problems. We deserve to be taken seriously, damn it. If we deserve nothing else, we deserve that.
So I got ranty today on the SPARC/ARL list. And as is the way of these things, I expect I’ll regret it in the morning. But I also expect some other librarian will have an easier time of it sometime in the future because of my rant, and I guess that helps a little.