I respect John Willinsky, don’t get me wrong, but I wonder sometimes if the man lives on the same planet with the rest of us.
He’s got some suggestions for “concerned lawyers, teachers and members of the public,” who are apparently supposed to (individually?) lobby their local institutions of higher education for the establishment of institutional repositories, and the widespread awareness among the faculty of those august institutions that they really, really ought to be self-archiving in those IRs.
I’m sorry, I’m stuck between laughing and crying again. Willinsky is a faculty member himself. Does he seriously believe random emails from random members of the public are going to make a lick of difference in the inbred cloisters of the ivory tower?
I’ll go you one better. This set of suggestions is at the end of a short essay nominally about institution-level mandates. I’m done laughing. I’m crying now. Because Willinsky offers not the ghost of a clue how those are supposed to happen. He just hopes Stevan Harnad is right, and they do.
Well, sure, I hope Stevan Harnad is right too! But I wouldn’t bet so much as a devalued American penny on it. If there are five more institutional mandates in the United States by the end of 2008, the drinks are on me. The professoriate is not ready for mandates—and before somebody trots out the tired old “but they’ll accept them!” line, I ask you all to remember that the professoriate is largely self-governing on the institutional level. It doesn’t just have to accept mandates, it has to institute them.
Fat chance. You’ll notice Willinsky isn’t trumpeting his own institution’s progress toward a mandate. (Not even his school or department’s. So much for the patchwork mandate.) Mandates start at home, folks.
I appreciate optimism. I do. But blue-sky happytalk is not optimism; it’s blindness, and it’s getting in the way.
