Paying for OA
Arthur Sale nails it again:
[The institution] recognizes that author-side fees are now a significant requirement, and moves to re-align its ‘acquisitions budget’ to become a ‘research journal budget’. A fraction of the journals budget is reserved for supporting alternative funding models, and the institution commits to monitoring and adapting its expenditure to match the change in the industry and the activity of its authors.
Yes. This needs to happen. It will not, however, be an easy sell—serials librarians and collection developers are going to scream bloody murder. If budget reallocation to support of open access is to happen in spite of the screaming, library top brass must back it.
I’ve said before that academic librarians are sadly ignorant about open access; our discipline’s research literature lags well behind others in progress toward OA. Sale’s eminently sensible and logical proposal is unfortunately liable to run aground on that very same ignorance, that very same apathy.
“What about print?” many of them are going to say, and not without reason; despite trends, many researchers do still use and prefer print, and librarians have to make them happy too.
“Bah, that OA stuff—it’s all vanity-published trash,” some of them will say. In my experience, academic librarians have a strong, largely implicit, and (of course) completely erroneous belief that “you get what you pay for.” In the long run, it’s possible that making them set aside some of their budget to support OA will turn them into advocates—they’re paying for it, so it must be all right. But in the short run, open access smells funny to them, much as it does to many faculty.
“We can’t trust that digital stuff; nobody’s preserving it,” some of them are (still!) going to say. That I’ve had librarians say this to my face, when digital preservation is part of what I do, may perhaps serve as an ignorance measure. (It may also be a measure of pushback against digital librarianship in general. Don’t kid yourselves: academic libraries contain substantial quantities of this style of passive-aggressive pushback, and since OA is digital, OA is implicated.)
“Open access isn’t something we can control; it’s all in faculty hands,” still others will say. I heard this from a senior librarian a month or so ago.
And finally, there’s the ever-popular, “You’re destroying my budget!” When I say “scream bloody murder,” this is what I mean. Serials librarians and collection developers are not going to welcome anything that makes them cut more subscriptions. They aren’t thinking ten, twenty, or fifty years in the future. They’re thinking about the angry faculty they’ll see next week.
Sale’s contention that “Libraries that do not adapt to the changing scenarios run the risk of being labeled by their researchers as biased and failing to meet researchers’ needs” is a spot of mad wish-fulfillment in an otherwise solid thought-piece. For one thing, as Peter Suber must be tired of saying, most OA journals do not charge author fees; this cuts down considerably on the number of faculty inconvenienced by them. For another, those journals that do charge author fees are generally in well-funded research disciplines, where they’re considered less onerous and are more likely to be grant-funded.
For a third, faculty are hazy on where their journals come from to begin with. They don’t know enough about scholarly publishing to think about coming to libraries for OA author-fee money. Even if a few of them do, they won’t be talking to librarians like me who can and will advocate for them—they’ll be talking to liaisons and collection developers, who are (I say again) clueless about OA when they’re not active doubters. For a fourth, per Vivian Siegel, how many faculty are even aware of a journal’s OA status when they publish in it? How many libraries that set up such a fund are going to be besieged by faculty wanting to pay page charges in toll-access journals?
So faculty demand for OA author fees isn’t going to impinge on collection-developer consciousness. They’ll just see OA as one more thing decimating their budgets. And they’ll scream about it, I promise you.
I’m not throwing cold water on Sale’s idea. I reiterate: I completely agree that serials-acquisitions budgets need to move toward funding open access. (In fact, I go a little beyond Sale; I think, selfishly if you will, that some of that money ought to be funneled toward institutional repositories and library-internal digitization, publishing, and publishing-support projects.) I am only trying to explain why this will be a hard slog, at least in US academic libraries. Forewarned, forearmed.
How do we cure academic-librarian ignorance of OA? I wish I knew, and I’m open to suggestions. It might help if OA advocates reminded themselves daily that librarians and libraries exist. A mantra, of sorts: Libraries exist; libraries matter; OA would not exist without libraries.
In other D-Lib news, the British contingent has a fine article on preservation vis-à-vis institutional repositories. Nice change from the narrow-minded “open access doesn’t care about preservation!” crowd and the contemptuous “IRs are no good for preservation!” info-sci crowd. Also, I appreciate the blunt appraisal of OA’s battle for hearts and minds in this article about Australian repositories. Sugarcoating reality is useless, and the Australian contingent is remarkable for not doing it.