From Library Babel Fish, October 22, 2013
I have been known to chide academic librarians who can’t be bothered to make their work open access. It seems hypocritical for professionals in our field to advocate for open access without practicing it ourselves. It’s also detrimental to our discipline. Most research in our field is undertaken in order to improve practice. Many academic librarians work in libraries that don’t have access to many LIS journals because our collections are shaped around the curriculum, and we don’t offer degrees in the field. It’s hard to improve our practice without access to the discipline’s research findings. Besides, if we go through the relatively simple steps to make our work open access, we’ll have experiential knowledge about the process that will help us help scholars in other fields who want to make their work available to all
This isn’t the first time I’ve called on librarians to walk the walk. It probably won’t be the last. Scholars in our field have an increasing number of options these days, with many new open access journals. Our flagship journal, College & Research Libraries, is now fully open. Preprints are made available on acceptance, the final copy is OA, and even the back issues have been digitized. In addition, most toll access LIS journals allow authors to publicly archive pre- or post-prints. The barriers to opening our scholarship are low.
I was a little surprised at some of the pushback I got via Twitter. Maybe I shouldn’t have been. I’ve heard it before, pretty much every time open access is under discussion in other disciplines. It tends to fall into a pattern:
- It’s not ethical to ask young scholars to put their future at risk.
- We ought to reform tenure and promotion criteria, but until that work is done, we shouldn’t be so pushy about open access.
- Reform tenure? Yeah, right. Ain’t gonna happen.
In addition to the usual objections, two other issues came up. One was usefully thought-provoking and the other was . . . well, a perennial debate among academic librarians.
One Twitter correspondent asked about books and book chapters. Does my finger-shaking include them? I replied that I thought they were a bit different. There are fewer open access options available to authors who want to put together a book, books are often more lendable than journal articles through interlibrary loan without incurring copyright permission fees, and unlike the majority of scholarly journals, book publishers tend not to allow self-archiving or pre- or post-prints. At least they don’t unless you ask, and getting an answer can take months.
I got called out on that – aha! isn’t it hypocritical to say articles must be OA, but not books and book chapters? Um, yes, actually. So let’s push the boundaries there, too. Why not? The more publishers are asked about self-archiving options, the more likely they will have an answer that doesn’t take months of negotiation. Some book publishers, such as our own association’s impr