• We have a new Open Access Directory wiki, with real institutional backing (doesn’t surprise me that it’s Simmons, either; they’re good people there) and real wiki gardeners. I’m mildly worried about the edit-access policies being a tad restrictive, but we’ll see. This is a good and valuable thing, and when I get out from under this summer’s over-busyness, I’ll set aside some time to contribute.
• Harvard Law followed in the footsteps of Harvard FAS, unanimously approving a permissions mandate. Good for them, of course. If this keeps up, though, I may end up buying the drinks. I’m not sure it’s fair to count Harvard and Harvard Law as separate institutions, and thank goodness I thought to restrict myself to the United States or I’d have lost this bet already. I think I still have a fair chance of coming out financially unscathed—but the University of California system could sink me in a stroke. I’d love to see ’em do it. And I probably owe Willinsky an apology; I wouldn’t be surprised if he knew what was cooking at Harvard when he wrote that.
• Mike Rossner of Rockefeller UP continues his astounding streak of win and awesome, returning copyright on journal articles to authors on condition they make the content OA, and putting CC licenses on published articles going forward. Do we have an award we can give him? He deserves a big shiny meter-tall trophy or something of that nature.

Cheers all ’round!

One small onion to the NIH, which is refusing to budge from its somebody-else’s-problem stance on recalcitrant publishers. I still think this one’s going to bite them, and it may turn out to bite us, too. We’ll see. Nobody will be happier if I’m wrong than I.

DSpace’s administrative and item-submission interfaces are more like the temporary Jeeves replacement Bertie got stuck with once, the guy who snarled all the time and snaffled socks. It is about as courteous as a New York cabdriver in heavy traffic. As a result, it wastes incredible amounts of human time—my time, my sysadmin’s time, my submitters’ time, the time of dozens of admins just like me. I promised to talk about that, so I will.

For example. Just this morning I got an unhappy email from a submitter who didn’t have access to all the collections in a given community. The said collections are two or three levels deep because of intervening subcommunities—and while I’m talking about wasted time, I’ll spend a few words on wasted cognitive capacity, because I have yet to meet anyone for whom the DSpace distinction between communities and collections is intuitive or useful. My submitters expect to be able to submit items to communities. They do not understand why some items on the sitemap (which is how they think of the communities-and-collections page) are bold and others aren’t. I hate wasting time and effort explaining this stupid and essentially otiose distinction.

Right. Back to my submitter and her problem. I had to click open every single collection in order to click again to check its submitter list. For those collections she didn’t have submit access to, adding it was a four-click process and could have been more: click to open the eperson list, click to go to the last page, click to select her address (she’s late in the alphabet), click to update the submitter group. Wasted. Time.

And don’t get me started on DSpace’s repo-rat–hostile habit of building impenetrable names for otherwise-unnamed submitter groups. COLLECTION_27_SUBMIT. Yeah, that makes all kinds of sense in my little rat brain, how about yours? (If you’re wondering, the number is the collection’s database identifier, which is almost impossible to figure out from the DSpace UI. Real friendly, DSpace.) And these names proliferate like rats, because there’s no way to tell DSpace “use the people I just told you about, plzkthx” without going through the added hassle of creating and naming an actual group, and no way to tell DSpace “use the standard access rules for this community” or “use the access rules for this other collection.”

So then I needed to set up a new collection for her. Could DSpace pick up on the submitter-selection work I’d already wasted a bunch of time doing? Could it hell. I had to go through the same clickety-clickety process all over again. There’s no access templating in DSpace; every single collection in every single community is sui generis. Just imagine how much time I get to waste when someone leaves the university and someone else takes over their DSpace deposit duties! Woo-hoo! Because obviously I don’t have anything important to do with my time.

Which brings us to the DSpace deposit interface. To be clear, I’m working from 1.4.2 here, not 1.5—but let’s be clear about something else too, namely that 1.5 doesn’t fix all of these warts, though the Configurable Submission system is indeed a step forward. So let’s waste some time, everybody!

You start your submission from a collection page, or you start from My DSpace, in which case it asks you to pick a collection. What does it do with this collection information? It determines whether you have deposit access, duh, and if your friendly neighborhood repository-rat has spent time customizing a metadata form for that collection, it uses that form. (Does DSpace ask on collection creation which metadata forms to use? It does not. That’s configured via a file called input-forms.xml on the server. Mm-hm, that’s right, I have nothing better to do with my time than seek out and edit—twice, because I keep a version in source control—bitsy little XML files DSpace leaves all over creation.) Anything else? Like surveying existing items in that collection for commonalities in order to prepopulate metadata fields? Nah. Machine learning would save a human being’s time or something. Can’t have that.

Next you run into this screen, which I loathe with a white-hot loathing neutron stars might envy:

The top question is just goofy. In my experience, this is true for less than one-tenth of one percent of submissions. The Québécois might have a use for that checkbox, but how many DSpace installations does Québéc have exactly, and why exactly wouldn’t a Québécois installation just put in dc.title.alternative by default? So why is every submitter into every DSpace installation forced to cope with that moronic checkbox for every single submission? Because DSpace doesn’t give a tinker’s damn about anybody’s time or cognitive load, that’s why. The default is correct, at least, but that’s decidedly small comfort.

(I suspect there’s a librarian at the bottom of this interface wart somewhere. What about MARC 246, someone must have screamed. Guess what? I don’t care about MARC 246. I care about efficient use of person-hours, which that checkbox unquestionably isn’t. I love my fellow librarians, except when I hate them. I hate them when they gleefully glomp every iota of patron time and effort they can get their little mitts on.)

The middle question is difficult to understand (for my submitters, anyway; more of them get it wrong than right), and DSpace doesn’t explain why you have to answer it. I get a lot of questions from submitters about putting in publication dates and citations, because my submitters don’t mentally connect those fields with that checkbox. But that’s what that checkbox does when checked: it adds fields to the next metadata screen for dc.date.issued, dc.publisher, and dc.identifier.citation. (How many repository-rats running DSpace just learned something? Don’t be embarrassed. It was months before I figured it out, too, and I had to go in and read code before I had it sussed.)

But it gets better (for “worse” values of “better”). Imagine Ulysses Acqua for a moment, trying to be nice to Dr. Troia and the little open-access basketology journal she wants to archive. He uses the input-forms.xml file to make a custom metadata form that puts basic citation information for the basketology journal in dc.identifier.citation so Dr. Troia doesn’t have to retype it every time. When Dr. Troia submits her first article, she doesn’t think to tick the middle checkbox, and DSpace doesn’t tick it for her. What happens?

SHE GETS AN ERROR MESSAGE. I kid you not. AN ERROR MESSAGE. It reads “You’ve indicated that your submission has not been published or publicly distributed before, but you’ve already entered an issue date, publisher and/or citation. If you proceed, this information will be removed, and DSpace will assign an issue date.”

I—I—I honestly have no words. Do I need them? Maybe I do. The Jeeves interface never, ever, EVER threatens to discard information Bertie has provided it. It’s hard enough to pry useful information out of Bertie as it is! And talk about your bizarrely opaque, unhelpful, and inappropriately finger-wagging error messages! (How does Dr. Troia fix the problem, if she wants to keep her citation information or date or whatever? The message doesn’t even say.) I am just agog that this grotesque interaction exists in a production software system.

(Yes, of course I’ve triggered it. How do you think I figured out it exists? I don’t go looking for smelly garbage like this, I assure you.)

But it even gets worse than that. Weird interactions between input-forms.xml and the deposit code can make checkboxes on this page disappear when they shouldn’t. I haven’t dug into how this happens—but it bit me hard, such that I had to be unhelpful and take a date.issued out of a thesis metadata form in input-forms.xml. Because hey, troubleshooting DSpace’s sclerotic deposit system is such a productive use of my time!

Returning to our initial screen once more: there is absolutely no need whatever to ask the submitter about multiple files. None. Simply assume that submissions may have more than one file! Asking submitters to think about it up-front instead of at upload is wasted time.

So there we have it. An entire wasted screen, multiplied by untold numbers of DSpace submissions. There’s plenty more in there, the licensing system not least; Jeeves interface, not so much.

EPrints, as a rule, is a much better gentleperson’s personal gentleperson than DSpace. EPrints, for example, asks for item type up front, and configures its deposit screens to match, without the intervention of either submitter or repository-rat. Who knows, this politeness may have something to do with developer attitude. The last time I waxed profane on matters repository-interface-ish, Les Carr was in my inbox less than a day later asking eagerly, “is this what you mean? would this solution I just came up with work for you?” Whereas DSpace gets on my case for being negative. I’m just sayin’ here.

No. No, I’m not just sayin’. It runs deeper than that. I’ve occasionally seen a few nods in the DSpace developer community toward EPrints interface accomplishments. Unfortunately, the feel of the discourse I’ve seen is “look at all the shiny AJAX! we want that!”

This is not about shiny AJAX, people. It’s not about shiny at all. This is about DSpace not wasting my time. There’s a ton of work DSpace could do with the aim of removing time-wasters before anyone writes a single line of Javascript or de-uglifies a single line of CSS. To do so, though, DSpace developers will have to learn to give a damn about my time and the amount of it DSpace has wasted and continues to waste. I see next to zero evidence of that learning taking place. (Tim gets it, which is why I say “next to zero” rather than just plain zero.)

Stop. Wasting. My. Time. That’s far and away the most important interface-development priority DSpace should adopt. For values of “me” that include “all repository-rats and willing depositors,” of course. DSpace’s interface needs to sit down at its mama’s knee and learn some courtesy.

Now my mom can quit bugging me to go write a book already. Okay, okay, so I really only wrote slightly less than half of one. My name is on the cover. Dayenu.

This book is what you buy if you have K-12 (or maybe even undergraduate) students who would like to write book reports on an author they might, you know, actually like. There are also some readers-advisory bits that I think came out pretty well (and I say this having opposed some of them pretty strenuously at the time): if-you-liked pullouts on some authors and subgenre listings in back. It’s a pretty good mix of authors if I do say so myself; we pulled off a couple of fairly daring tricks, such as including three or four graphic-novel authors as well as several YA authors, and openly acknowledging the female half of male-female writing partnerships. (Yes, I know, the latter shouldn’t be daring, but find me another reference book that does it properly, I dare you.)

If I had it to do over, I’d make much more of a point of expanding coverage of writers of color, who regularly get shafted in what turns into a self-reinforcing cycle: they don’t get read because readers-advisory books don’t include them, and then readers-advisory books don’t include them because their readerships aren’t large. I did make a total pest of myself to keep a couple-three excellent, less-known-than-they-oughta-be writers of color in our readalike lists, and I’m not sorry about that at all, just sorry it had to come to that.

But for now—Jen’s and my book, let me show you it.

Fewer than ten librarians attended.

Just a datapoint. If I say any more I’ll dunk myself in the soup.

$DEITY, do I hear that one a lot. Sometimes it’s a piece of software. Sometimes it’s a genre of software (wikis are a particular target, I have found). Sometimes it’s open access, or the broader questions of scholarly communication. Whatever it is, it makes me look around and wonder just what the hell profession I landed in, anyhow. I thought we were all about the knowledge-seeking? Guess that’s just on behalf of patrons, though. Our own professional issues we’re allowed to be deliberately incurious about. Or something.

Right. Yeah. Take the Uzi away from me. Thank you. This really burns my britches.

My current hypothesis is that librarianship has two paradigms for picking up professional knowledge: the single spray and the steady stream. I am an unabashed steady-streamer. I read professional stuff every gosh-darn day, liblogs and techblogs and online journals and reports and conference rundowns and whathaveyou. I’m not indiscriminate; I can’t afford to be. Some people in my very own subfield I don’t read, often because they raise my blood pressure uselessly. Some reports I get to the end of the exec summary and chuck; not worth the effort. Sometimes stuff is so bad I can only go “WTF?” and move on. Even so. Every day. Every day I read something. Something.

My reading patterns aren’t perfect; most of “the literature” passes me right on by. I did slightly better when I was teaching last fall, because I held office hours in the SLIS library and was in close proximity to the new-print-journals shelf. I’d do better if more libsci journals offered TOC newsfeeds; I’ll go to some effort to dig up something interesting-looking once I know about it. Honestly, though, most of my lit-awareness lives in my Bloglines these days.

Still. Every day. Every day I read something.

I get the sense a lot of my colleagues prefer the single-spray method of learning. You go to a conference or a workshop or some other kind of meeting. You learn what’s being sprayed at you in concentrated bursts. You bring back what you learned. You do your job and let the world fly by because you’re too busy to read, until the next conference.

I suppose this must work out all right for them. I just cannot, cannot imagine functioning that way myself. I’d feel as though I’d suddenly lost my sight or hearing.

This pattern, if I have it right, may have implications for the spread of open-access awareness among academic librarians. If we’re going to hit the single-sprayers, we have to hit the ALAs and ACRLs and state library conferences good and hard. I am not volunteering for this duty, y’all; I’ve been to one ACRL, and one was a lifetime’s worth for me. My distaste for librarian zoos is downright visceral.

But somebody’s gotta do it.

One told me (paraphrased), “I wouldn’t know anything much about open access if not for you.”

Y’know, I said academic librarians were largely ignorant of OA in Roach Motel, and I got some pushback on that. I’d like the pushers-back to kindly buy me a drink now. Yeah, yeah, you’re not ignorant, sure. I challenge you to find five others at YPOW not directly working with an institutional repository or OA publishing program who aren’t. Just five. I’m guessing that if you can even do it, it’ll take work.

Trailblazing. Bah. It is for the birds.

I am not a rock star in librarianship. Meredith and I both have second master’s, graduated at the same time, got jobs at the same time, blogged about getting jobs at the same time, got interested in social software at the same time (well, okay, I started blogging first, but that’s irrelevant)—and she’s a rock star and I’m not. Let’s pick through that a moment.

First of all, everything in Meredith’s post is absolutely true. Fill a need. Be passionate. Spend your own time and money. Make it about something besides you. Grow some guts. Network. Don’t let geographic barriers bar you from the opportunities available via web contacts. Self-promote. Second of all, I don’t think Meredith and I are all that far apart in raw talent. (If you disagree, leave me to my happy illusions, please!) Third of all, I’ve done nearly everything Meredith mentions. (Including spend money, gah. Like water sometimes.) Nobody’s ever accused me of a lack of passion!

But for me, that didn’t turn out to be enough. Hmmmm.

Let’s be frank. Some of it is right-place-right-time-right-topic caprice. The spotlight hit wikis just as Meredith did. She didn’t plan that; she couldn’t have. Some people do try to plan it, try to make spotlights that they can then inhabit. Sometimes it even works… but honestly, I think rockstars are different from attention-mongers, and I definitely have an internal classifier; don’t you? As for me, institutional repositories don’t have a spotlight, and very likely never will. So I could make all the right moves (not that I have; just sayin’) and still never be a rockstar. Nota bene, this is not an argument about who “deserves” rockstardom, not least because I find such arguments virulently poisonous; it’s an argument about who gets it, and a plea to people not to beat themselves up if they don’t. Sometimes it’s really, truly not you.

Some of the rockstar machine is inextricably tied up with societal appearance norms that privilege certain looks over others. This is an unpopular thing for me to say, but so be it; it’s true. Meredith comes one hell of a lot closer to this society’s standard for attractiveness than I do. There’s a bloody good reason I keep pictures of myself off the web; it’s far better for me if the Internet doesn’t know I’m a dog. Again, this is not an argument about just deserts—well, okay, to some extent it is; appearance ought to be largely irrelevant, but it’s not, and that has some evil, evil knock-on effects. People of color don’t get a fair shake in this or any field, and yes, the markedness of their appearance compared to the white-bread norm is partly why. Women don’t get a fair shake in tech for similar reasons; we’re capital-D Different. What I’m saying is, if rockstardom is your goal, it’s worth thinking about where you are with regard to appearance. You can be plain, even as mud-fence ugly a woman as I am (note that ugly doesn’t matter as much for men as for women), and still do fine; it’s a disadvantage that may, however, disqualify you from actual rockstardom. Life isn’t fair.

Certain demeanor expectations also operate in the rockstar realm. Library rockstars are, logically enough, what we think librarians ought to be: genial, fun, optimistic, helpful, gregarious, pleasant people—but not too in-your-face about anything (again, especially for women; men have more leeway here), and certainly not deeply anti-establishment (for several possible values of “establishment”), because that’s intimidating. Think about the library rockstars you know, and see if I’m not mostly right. Now me, I violate these norms regularly onblog, on-mailing-list, and in my speaking and writing (Roach Motel was one gigantic exercise in norm violation in the IR subfield; it shocked one of its reviewers!). I don’t see how there can be any doubt in this world that it’s made me an unlikely candidate for rockstardom.

I’m not alone. I have good friends in librarianship who are just that leetle bit too iconoclastic to be rockstars; I adduce Bob “boats against the current” Molyneux as a good example, since he’s gone more or less public about it. They find their places, most of them, as I’ve found mine; sometimes very high places (you know who you are, person I have in mind!). More power to ’em; sometimes a damn good hole-poking skeptic is worth a dozen rockstars. But sometimes they chafe. Sometimes I chafe. Rockstars tend to keep their chafing to themselves, or to a tight circle of friends. Not an absolute rule, just a tendency.

Ah, me. Discouraging the young again. I should be ashamed, I suppose.

Look, folks, rockstardom isn’t the only face of success. In spite of my bulldog’s face, in spite of my snark, in spite of everything, I am quite as successful as I need or want to be. I found work in my heart’s home. When I need to say something serious about what I do, I can get it said and hearkened to, here or even (to my own surprise) in The Literature. (I could do considerably more, even, if I were a more fluent writer than I am.) In spite of the people I’ve alienated (and they are not few), I have my own network of well-loved colleagues and friends; I’ve never been lonely in this marvelous profession. If rockstardom got dumped in my lap, I’m honestly not entirely sure what I would do, but I lean toward “running and hiding,” because I have serious being-around-hordes and travel-hassle limits, and rockstardom would stomp all over them.

(I have an evil brain. It is now projecting images of 1984’s Room 101, with me shackled to the chair and rockstardom lurking and lashing its tail behind the little grate, with me screaming, “Do it to Sarah! Not me! Sarah!” Yeah. Evil. Um, sorry, Sarah.)

Most of all, I have the luxury of defining success for myself. I fully and freely acknowledge that non-tenure-track academic librarianship has its discontents, but they pale to insignificance beside the phenomenal freedom of picking my own goalposts. Rockstardom, even in easygoing librarianship, has been known to turn into the Russian’s plaint in Chess:

Now I’m where I want to be and who I want to be and doing what I always said I would and yet I feel I haven’t won at all!
Running for my life and never looking back in case there’s someone right behind to shoot me down and say he always knew I’d fall.

No, thanks. That’s not a life I’d even want to risk having. See my sidebar! And think good and hard about your own goalposts, please, before you set your sights on rockstardom.

I look forward to seeing how faculty react. They might rise up in anger. Or they might cower under their desks. I’m not sure any more.

If I were the Georgia State library, though, I’d play hardball. No e-reserves for anybody, and let faculty go whine at the AAP.

This is the real deal, folks. Real repository-rats running real repositories dealing with real problems and achieving real successes, speaking in their own voices unmediated by discourses of fear or open-access dogma. Stop hanging on every word from the Big Thinkers. This is where the action is. These are the people I was trying (in my stumbling fashion) to speak for when I wrote Roach Motel.

Themes I saw:

• The library running the repository deposits most of the content, be it content from faculty/researchers or library-generated content. Unmediated faculty/researcher deposit is a pipe dream.
• Faculty and researchers haven’t heard of the repository qua repository, even the ones who use it. (This is identical to their behavior faced with library-purchased electronic resources. That the library is involved, that there’s a service involved, with people behind it, just doesn’t register with them.)
• Running open-source repository software is a hassle.

None of this should surprise anyone… and yet it will, I’m sure.

My personal thanks to all the people who wrote case studies. Keep writing, please! Write, and speak, and represent. We can’t progress until we have a fair, truthful sense of where we are, and to get there we have to hack through a right jungle of obfuscatory rhetoric and unjustifiable happytalk.

Also, I owe Les Carr an apology; he offered me a sneak peek at these in return for my reactions, and I never did get back to him. I couldn’t be happier that these have a good home.

I haven’t heard any worry over the fate of publishers. If I were a toll-access publisher, I would be worried by this. As I’m not, I’m not.

Without undue tooting of my own horn, let me say that my concerns about recalcitrant publishers have proven to occupy a lot of faculty brainspace. I don’t live in the medical-research realm, so I don’t know how much of this worry is futile handwringing and how much identifies a genuine problem. I only know that deans are worried particularly about protecting their junior faculty, who already find publishing an uphill climb. The sooner we all address this, the easier we will all find the compliance process.

I have heard a lot of worry over the versioning problem, from faculty spanning quite a few disciplines (with the understanding that “NIH grantee” implies a fairly narrow range to begin with). “What happens when copyediting catches real errors, or changes the thrust of an argument?” runs the basic version of this question. “The version in PMC will simply be wrong.”

This is not a silly or uninformed objection. I used to work for a publishing-services bureau; I know full well what “final” peer-reviewed manuscripts look like before and after copyediting. Let me tell you, a good copyeditor is worth his or her weight in diamonds, and it warms my text-artisanly heart that faculty realize this as well. Final manuscripts can be disasters; research faculty can be terrible writers and terrible writing teachers.

I saw a suggestion that copyediting happen before the journal-submission process. I’m sorry, but no, that won’t work. Part of the copyediting process involves bashing the manuscript (citations especially) into journal style, which obviously can’t be done until the journal has been chosen. Another part is marking it for typesetting, which is intimately connected with each journal’s particular typesetting practices. You can’t just pick copyediting up and dump it in front of manuscript submission; you’d only add a step, slowing the whole publication process down and increasing its cost.

At present, the only workaround for this (as I understand matters) is working with a publisher cooperative enough to replace PMC’s manuscript version with the published version. These publishers exist, but they are not exactly numerous. For PR purposes if for no other reason (and “accuracy” is a plenty good enough reason all by itself), I think it would be wise for PMC to work out a way for PIs and other authors to fix errors in their manuscripts. I have heard the versioning problem called “a flaw in the policy” and “suicidal” by people in very high places.

Another difficulty has to do with the principal investigator’s responsibility under the policy, given that the PI is likely not an author (much less the first or corresponding author) on every single article coming from a given NIH grant. This is a tough one to resolve, given that the buck has to stop somewhere, but I would suggest at the least that first/corresponding authors as well as PIs be able to approve manuscripts and offer corrections.

Reading the NIH’s comment stream, I see that the too-much-work backlash has begun. In my cynical way, I tend to ignore this particular objection (trusting in Swan’s research on mandates to back me), but if we open-access advocates want to be smart about this, we will sort out how to help libraries offer third-party PMC submission services. (Disclaimer: MPOW does this. It was not my decision, though I support it wholeheartedly.) PMC could help us all by providing a deposit API (preferably based on SWORD) that those of us with institutional repositories could program against. Not only will that allow people like me to get in on the repositing action, it will help institutions monitor compliance and provide useful services (such as local PMCID/NIHMSID databases) to faculty. As mandates become more numerous, local services become even more important, as they allow faculty to become accustomed to one deposit interface, not a dozen. Please, PMC, set the example here!

Confusion about the policy is rampant, though MPOW is doing its level best to calm the waters. I do worry about institutions that are letting this slide—which is most of them! I suggest that the NIH target marketing efforts at libraries as well as researchers. MPOW and other institutions like it prove that we can help. The problem is that not all of us know we should. If the NIH isn’t working with SPARC to clue in the larger research-library community, it should be.

Happy Open Access Week!