The Medical Library Association did what I thought was an impressive and effective webcast on open access today. No ’cast with Heather Joseph in it can be all bad, but I was impressed with how up-to-date, engaged, and persuasive the other participants were as well.
Except that—as usual—the repository-rats got left out to shiver in the cold.
I fired in a question that tried to address this, but I didn’t phrase it well and it got mangled by the facilitator. (Yep, that one.) My issue, in brief, is that the envisioned role for librarians in the brave new open access world is as educators, advocates, negotiators—everything but actual collection developers!
Look, the reality is that we can jawbone faculty until we turn blue in the face and it will accomplish nothing on the green-OA side. It disturbs me, profoundly, that nobody seems to be talking about active content harvest and collection. (The closest anybody got in the webcast was the suggestion of dual-mode deposit into PubMed Central and the local repository. Yes! This is what I’m talking about, people! But it’s not nearly enough.)
And until we start talking about beating the bushes for content, we’re still leaving our poor repository-rats twisting in the wind. I must say, my ratty little neck is getting sore.
