[The institution] recognizes that author-side fees are now a significant requirement, and moves to re-align its ‘acquisitions budget’ to become a ‘research journal budget’. A fraction of the journals budget is reserved for supporting alternative funding models, and the institution commits to monitoring and adapting its expenditure to match the change in the industry and the activity of its authors.
Yes. This needs to happen. It will not, however, be an easy sell —serials librarians and collection developers are going to scream bloody murder. If budget reallocation to support of open access is to happen in spite of the screaming, library top brass must back it.
I’ve said before that academic librarians are sadly ignorant about open access; our discipline’s research literature lags well behind others in progress toward OA. Sale’s eminently sensible and logical proposal is unfortunately liable to run aground on that very same ignorance, that very same apathy.
“What about print?” many of them are going to say...
“Bah, that OA stuff —it’s all vanity-published trash,” some of them will say....
“We can’t trust that digital stuff; nobody’s preserving it,” some of them are (still!) going to say....
“Open access isn’t something we can control; it’s all in faculty hands,” still others will say....
And finally, there’s the ever-popular, “You’re destroying my budget!” When I say “scream bloody murder,” this is what I mean. Serials librarians and collection developers are not going to welcome anything that makes them cut more subscriptions. They aren’t thinking ten, twenty, or fifty years in the future. They’re thinking about the angry faculty they’ll see next week....
[F]aculty are hazy on where their journals come from to begin with. They don’t know enough about scholarly publishing to think about coming to libraries for OA author-fee money. Even if a few of them do, they won’t be talking to librarians like me who can and will advocate for them—they’ll be talking to liaisons and collection developers, who are (I say again) clueless about OA when they’re not active doubters. [And] per Vivian Siegel, how many faculty are even aware of a journal’s OA status when they publish in it? How many libraries that set up such a fund are going to be besieged by faculty wanting to pay page charges in toll-access journals? ...
How do we cure academic-librarian ignorance of OA? I wish I knew, and I’m open to suggestions. It might help if OA advocates reminded themselves daily that librarians and libraries exist. A mantra, of sorts: Libraries exist; libraries matter; OA would not exist without libraries....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/17/2007 02:50:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
