Next time? Think.
I told them so. I told them so. Last winter. I told them.
I talked to a roomful of publishers last December. These were not junior editors or wet-behind-the-ears interns. These were the wheelers and dealers, the top brass, the VIPs. (Scared me clean out of my wits at the time. I was expecting peasants like myself, and seeing court nobility, I came closer to panic and stage fright than I ever have at a talk. Just lucky I had a hell of a lot of pain to act as distraction.)
A lot of my audience represented folks whose publishers are nominally (key word, that) part of the PRISM initiative. Maybe, as has been suggested, they didn’t know their employers were pulling this stunt. Me, I’m dubious; it’s the little guys who are protesting and backpedaling right now. But if they were at my talk, there is no excuse for saying they didn’t know PRISM would blow up in their face.
Because I told them.
I told them about the American Anthropological Association, which was in the middle of a messy crack-up over open access. The funny thing is, open access turned out to be almost a side issue. The real problem was that top brass, smugly sure everyone in the organization thought as they did, pulled a big stunt without asking anybody, and when they were called on it, they stonewalled. Result? Chaos, disaffection shading into open revolt, and (ironically) a strengthening of the very movement top brass wanted stopped. Don’t shoot yourself in the foot, I said; lay your cards on the table and discuss, don’t be arrogant, because AAA has weakened itself with this and you’d be shocked at how easy it is for you to do the same.
Huh. Ain’t that starting to sound familiar.
When the Dezenhall thing broke, I told ’em again. Get away from this, I said, far away. I didn’t say “it will win you no friends and make you plenty of enemies” because honestly, I thought that was obvious.
Guess not.
Look, here’s one last free clue, big-pig publishers. We in the open-access movement are, by and large, pit bulls. We are mean. We are scrappers. We are stubborn as mules; we have to be to stick it in this business. We bite as well as bark. Most dangerously of all, we are idealists, and despite a couple of embarrassing exceptions, we keep our noses clean. (I mean, consider. With my public bluntness and low diction, I’m damn near as embarrassing as open access gets. I’m not hangable, though, and the rest of the movement is a pack of Versailles courtiers compared to me.)
And most of us, unlike you, have very little to lose. Sure, I could be fired. That’s okay. I’m still a librarian. I’ll find something to do, never fear.
You are not in a good place to be messing with us, okay? We won’t always win, but we always fight—and we don’t have to win every time to erode your position and bolster ours. When you make it this easy for us—not to mention fracturing your own base, you idiots, how could you think that would not happen?—you lose. Big.
I’d rather fight an honorable opponent. Truly. Next time? Think.