Librarians should have a role in promoting open access content. The best methods and whether they are successful is a matter of heated debate. Take for an example a recent post by Micah Vandergrift on the ACRL Scholarly Communications mailing list, calling on librarians to stage a publishing walkout and only publish in open access library and information science journals. Many have already done so. Others, like myself, have published in traditional journals (only once in my case) but make a point of making their work available in institutional repositories. I personally would not publish in a journal that did not allow such use of my work, and I know many who feel the same way. 1 The point is, of course, to ensure that librarians are not be hypocritical in their own publishing and their use of repositories to provide open access–a long-standing problem pointed out by Dorothea Salo 2, among others3 We know that many of the reasons that faculty may hesitate to participate in open access publishing relate to promotion and tenure requirements, which generally are more flexible for academic librarians (though not in all cases–see Abigail Goben’s open access tenure experiment). I suspect that many of the reasons librarians aren’t participating more in open access has partly to do with more mundane reasons of forgetting to do so, or fearing that work is not good enough to make public.
But it shouldn’t be only staunch advocates of open access, open peer review, or new digital models for work and publishing who are participating. We have to find ways to advocate and educate in a gentle but vigorous manner, and reach out to new faculty and graduate students who need to start participating now if the future will be different. Enter Open Access Week, a now eight-year-old celebration of open access organized by SPARC. Just as Black Friday is the day that retailers hope to be in the black, Open Access Week has become an occasion to organize around and finally share our message with willing ears. Right?
It can be, but it requires a good deal of institutional dedication to make it happen. At my institution, Open Access Week is a big deal. I am co-chair of a new Scholarly Communications committee which is now responsible for planning the week (the committee used to just plan the week, but the scope has been extended). The committee has representation from Systems, Reference, Access Services, and the Information Commons, and so we are able to touch on all aspects of open access. Last year we had events five days out of five; this year we are having events four days out of five. Here are some of the approaches we are taking to creating successful conversations around open access.
- Focus on the successes and the impact of your faculty, whether or not they are publishing in open access journals.
The annual Celebration of Faculty Scholarship takes place during Open Access Week, and brings together physical material published by all faculty at a cocktail reception. We obtain copies of articles and purchase books written by faculty, and set up laptops to display digital projects. This is a great opportunity to find out exactly what our faculty are working on, and get a sense of them as researchers that we may normally lack. It’s also a great opportunity to introduce the concept of open access and recruit participants to the institutional repository.
- Highlight the particular achievements of faculty who are participating in open access.
We place stickers on materials at the Celebration that are included in the repository or are published in open access journals. This year we held a panel with faculty and graduate students who participate in open access publishing to discuss their experiences, both positive and negative.
- Demonstrate the value the library adds to open access initiatives.
Recently bepress (which creates the Digital Commons repositories on which ours runs) introduced a real time map of repositories downloads that was a huge hit this year. It was a compelling visual illustration of the global impact of work in the repository. Faculty were thrilled to see their work being read across the world, and it helped to solve the problem of invisible impact. We also highlighted our impact with a new handout that lists key metrics around our repository, including hosting a new open access journal.
- Talk about the hard issues in open access and the controversies surrounding it, for instance, CC-BY vs. CC-NC-ND licenses.
It’s important to not sugarcoat or spin challenging issues in open access. It’s important to include multiple perspectives and invite difficult conversations. Show scholars the evidence and let them draw their own conclusions, though make sure to step in and correct misunderstandings.
- Educate about copyright and fair use, over and over again.
These issues are complicated even for people who work on them every day, and are constantly changing. Workshops, handouts, and consultation on copyright and fair use can help people feel more comfortable in the classroom and participating in open access.
- Make it easy.
Examine what you are asking people to do to participate in open access. Rearrange workflows, cut red tape, and improve interfaces. Open Access Week is a good time to introduce new ideas, but this should be happening all year long.
We can’t expect revolutions in policy and and practice to happen overnight, or without some sacrifice. Whether you choose to make your stand to only publish in open access journals or some other path, make your stand and help others who wish to do the same.
Notes
- Publishers have caught on to this tendency in librarians. For instance, Taylor and Francis has 12-18 month repository embargoes for all its journals except LIS journals. Whether this is because of the good work we have done in advocacy or a conciliatory gesture remains up for debate. ↩
- Salo, Dorothea. “Innkeeper at the Roach Motel,” December 11, 2007. http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1793/22088. ↩
- Xia, Jingfeng, Sara Kay Wilhoite, and Rebekah Lynette Myers. “A ‘librarian-LIS Faculty’ Divide in Open Access Practice.” Journal of Documentation 67, no. 5 (September 6, 2011): 791–805. doi:10.1108/00220411111164673. ↩
Thanks for this Margaret! Just to clarify my post on SCHOLCOMM and add some context – my frustration and my opinion is that in our field (Librarianship) is hypocritical when it comes to open access.
We complained about the serials crisis for years and are now ramping up scholarly communication efforts everywhere asking faculty outside the library to do open access, yet the overwhelming majority of the journals in our field ARE NOT OPEN. Further, we do not exercise our rights to post all our work in repositories. In fact, we continue to submit our work to the very publishers that constrict the publishing system and squeeze every penny out of our budgets. I wasn’t necessarily saying that we should all only submit to OA journals (although I wish and hope that could be true), just that we must admit that it is a conflict of interest to support Publishers with our best writing, our service and editorial time, and our money when they continue to prove that they are not willing to budge on making scholarly communication an equitable and beneficial system for the authors.
I’m tired of Physics leading the charge for openness (see SCOAP3). And, I’m not just complaining, but am actively working on a solution to fix this problem. I think we need an Open Journal of Librarianship, functioning like PLOS or similar, that would replace the toll-access journals in our field. What if, for OA Week 2015, all of a sudden, we no longer submitted our labor to Publishers, but managed, promoted and did that work by ourselves, for ourselves, on our own terms?