Open Access News

Stevan Harnad posted a glowing encomium for Poynder’s article to the JISC-REPOSITORIES mailing list. This is no surprise. What surprised and gratified me were two cogent, politely critical responses, which Harnad has as yet not answered....Let me be clear: what Poynder said about librarian open-access efforts was offensive and shortsighted, and he could do worse than apologize for it on his weblog. Harnad’s enthusiastic response to Poynder tars him with the same brush, and he could stand to apologize also. But just for fun, let us play out a Harnadian scenario, in which libraries use IRs for their own projects and OA happens somewhere else entirely....Harnad’s own vision (based on his email, which is repeated at this post to his blog) appears to be small departmental faculty-spurred and faculty-owned fiefdoms, which would then be aggregated at the university level for harvesting and dissemination purposes. This would indeed carry some advantages: faculty evangelizing their colleagues is the best OA marketing there is. Also, such a fiefdom often requires consulting departmental administration, which is a sensible opening to lobby for a mandate.

My first question is this: If faculty cannot even drag themselves to deposit material into IRs where the library has done all the tech work for them up-front, how will they be convinced to start them? It is assuredly technically simple to do, but the complexity of the technical process is not and has never been the problem. The complexity of the social process is the problem, and I fail to see how Harnad’s proposal solves it....My second question concerns coverage. To achieve his stated goal of 100% OA to the peer-reviewed journal literature via departmental repositories, Harnad will have to convince every department and research unit on every college and university campus everywhere containing faculty who publish in the peer-reviewed journal literature to open a repository....This is a tall order....My third question concerns unnecessary duplication of effort. Though the technical and staff requirements of setting up and maintaining a digital repository are quite small, they are not zero. What is Harnad’s justification for duplicating the necessary effort and machinery across thousands of departments?...Still, I entirely favor Harnad pursuing this angle; there may be advantages to it I am not considering, and I stand to learn a lot about outreach to the faculty at MPOW should he succeed....[T]he rising tide would float my boat as well as Harnad’s; I should be insane to object....My sense still is that OA needs academic libraries and academic librarians.