Libraries and Learning
Checking Our Library Privilege
October 20, 2015
So, let’s say I’m doing research on issues related to privilege and inequality. Google Scholar tells me there’s a an article on stratification in higher education that’s looks interesting. Here’ another one on how postcolonial theory can inform resistance to neoliberalism in universities. And ooh, this looks really interesting: digital inequality and participation in the political process. How great that academics turn their methods and theories to solving the problem of inequality. Too bad most people won’t be able to read these articles.
The first one, from a Taylor and Francis journal, would cost me $40 if I weren’t affiliated at an institution that will spend a lot of money, much of it from student tuition, to get it for me. Shame those students will graduate in so much debt. Hey, somebody could write a good article about that. The second, from a journal published by Oxford University Press: $39.00. The third, from a Sage journal: $30. But hey, the abstracts are free and these publishers offer information about the journals’ impact factors, a variety of alternative metrics for each article, and a handy link so I can tell Twitter all about research that most people can’t read.
Like most forms of privilege, those who have it often don’t recognize it. It’s sneaky that way. As Jason Baird Jackson pointed out back in 2012, scholars with access to the record of research are the academic one percent. The first challenge is to recognize our privilege. The second is to examine what we do in our everyday lives that makes things unequal and work on fixing it.
There’s good news on that front. A number of the articles that I found in my search had versions available for anyone to read thanks to authors taking the trouble to self-archive them. And there are more and more creative ways to create a new infrastructure for funding the sharing of research more equitably than by depending on institutional affiliation. Open access publishing is gaining ground, and the humanities and social sciences are finally catching up to the sciences on developing new models. Here is a sampling of recent developments.
The Open Library of Humanities* just launched after a period of smart, thorough planning. This platform is host to a number of established journals that wanted to become more equitably available as well as new ones. In time books will hosted, too. This project is adapted to the context of the humanities, where authors aren’t assumed to have funding for their research to cover the costs of publishing it, as is more common in the sciences. The financial support required to run the platform is coming from library partners and funders such as Mellon, which has been pouring resources into ways of rethinking scholarly publishing. The mission of the Library of Humanities is “to support and extend open access to scholarship in the humanities – for free, for everyone, for ever.”
Luminos, an open acces