Yesterday I was flabbergasted to read about the Research Works Act (hat tip to @CopyrightLibn and @RepoRat), legislation which is strongly supported by the Association of American Publishers. As described on the AAP website:

The Research Works Act will prohibit federal agencies from unauthorized free public dissemination of journal articles that report on research which, to some degree, has been federally-funded but is produced and published by private sector publishers receiving no such funding. It would also prevent non-government authors from being required to agree to such free distribution of these works. Additionally, it would preempt federal agencies’ planned funding, development and back-office administration of their own electronic repositories for such works, which would duplicate existing copyright-protected systems and unfairly compete with established university, society and commercial publishers.

I recommend reading the AAP’s statement in full — it’s truly head-spinning. If this legislation goes through it would be a major blow to open access to scholarly research and publishing. And this comes on the heels of the (unsurprising, yet still disappointing) news that SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and the PROTECT IP act are also strongly supported by many commercial publishers.

Even more troubling are details on campaign contributions for the representatives who sponsored the act, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY). Biologist Michael Eisen used MapLight to learn that Elsevier contributed funds to Representative Maloney’s campaign last year. Anthropologist Jason Baird Jackson found Representative Issa’s name on Elsevier’s contributions list as well.

If this makes you furious (as it does me), you’re probably wondering what we can do beyond writing emails or phone calls to register our disagreement with these legislative acts. Here are some ideas — please share more in the comments!

Keep talking! Every time the commercial publishers come out in support of restricting access to scholarly research it’s another opportunity to widen the open access conversation. John Dupuis at Confessions of a Science Librarian and others have called for scholarly societies to resign their memberships in the AAP. What else can we say in support of open access in conversations with colleagues, faculty, and administrators?

Familiarize ourselves with the issues Many of us have likely perused the wide range of top notch resources out there on open access scholarly publishing. Peter Suber’s excellent overview of open access is a great place to start, and I highly recommend sharing it with those interested in learning the basics. To keep up with OA news and developments I follow Open Access Tracking Project on Twitter, or visit the Open Access Directory hosted by Simmons College.

Know where to go The louder the open access conversation gets, the more colleagues, faculty, and administrators are likely to come to us with questions. The DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) is a great place for scholars to start looking for open access journals to publish their research, and SHERPARoMEO has a wealth of information on both OA and toll access publishers’ copyright and self-archiving policies.

Practice what we preach It goes without saying that we should make every effort possible to publish our own research in open access venues. Jason Baird Jackson’s classic Getting Yourself Out of the Business in Five Easy Steps is well-worth a read for its sound advice on transitioning from commercial to open access publishing in all aspects of our participation in the scholarly communications system.

As academic librarians we’ve been advocates for open access for a long time, from the very beginning of the serials crisis (and far longer than I’ve been in the profession). But as these recent legislative acts demonstrate, it’s never been more important to push for ethical publishing practices and access to scholarly research.

Edited to add: The White House has extended the deadline for comments on open access to scientific publications to January 12, which is another way for us to express our support for OA (hat tip @brettbobley).

ACRLog welcomes a guest post from Marcia Dority Baker, the Access Services Librarian at the University of Nebraska College of Law, Schmid Law Library.

One of the great things about being an academic librarian at a law college is the ability to interact with a variety of departments. One such opportunity is a work in progress; this past spring our Associate Dean for Academic Affairs approached the library for assistance in promoting SSRN (the Social Science Research Network) and the UNL Digital Commons to faculty. Simultaneously, the law college Communication department was reviewing how to better promote the law college after a faculty member asked for help managing an email signature line. This allowed us to work with both departments in a new way.

After a few brainstorming sessions, we decided to better promote faculty scholarship and the law college in two ways: first by adding buttons to individual faculty pages that linked to a variety of resources and secondly, if interested faculty could add “flair” to their email signature line with the same buttons.

The university’s content management system recently migrated to Drupal, allowing individuals within departments better access to the law college website. The people who know the information best can update website pages more frequently. I’m now responsible for the law library web pages since I was already handling our social media presence.

Our faculty webpages are fairly static most of the year, typically updated when after annual reports are due or before the academic year begins. Most people search the internet for faculty members to find contact information, publications, areas of expertise or research, and/or courses taught; current content on these pages should be a priority. Since we don’t have a dedicated web person, the best option for our law college is to use buttons that link users to the most current information available. We decided on the following buttons: the UNL Digital Commons, SSRN, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Slideshare–a good mix of scholarly links, professional networking and social media.

The UNL Digital Commons is a hidden gem to most people outside the library, but an uncomplicated way to get faculty publications online. The only requirement from faculty is an email with their CV publication list, this doubles as permission to add their scholarship to the UNL Digital Commons. The Digital Commons staff then locates the publications, handles copyright, and scans and uploads the material into the repository. This process is user-friendly for our faculty, making it easy for them to say “yes” to having their scholarship in the Digital Commons–a great selling point for the librarians when promoting the service. A monthly report on material downloads is generated for all authors; this has increased conversation about the UNL Digital Commons as most people like seeing how many times their work has been accessed.

SSRN was initially utilized by approximately half of the law college faculty; the current number of participants is in flux as we talk to individuals about adding their scholarship. The big difference between the UNL Digital Commons and SSRN is that faculty members are responsible for uploading their publications to SSRN. The how-to instructions are clear, but asking professors to add material during the semester is a challenge. We work on the assumption that more articles will be uploaded during the academic year downtime. To help the process, the law librarians are promoting the SSRN FAQ section which is very helpful and can assist faculty with tech questions if need be.

The law librarians met individually or as a small group with the law college faculty to explain the SSRN & UNL Digital Commons buttons. During this time we also mentioned other options for faculty pages: the buttons for LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. There was some confusion as to which Facebook page a professor’s faculty page would link to–not their personal page but the law college’s or law library’s Facebook page. A number of the faculty expressed concern about professional versus personal information online, wanting to keep both sides separate. After meeting with faculty to determine their preferences, a student worker in the communications department adds the appropriate buttons to their page. The quicker we update their websites, the better success our endeavor has.

Our project timeframe is the current academic year; we anticipate talking with the entire law faculty this Fall. If we can’t connect due to various reasons, then we’ll meet this Spring semester. The current priority is adding buttons to faculty pages as we talk to law college faculty members, especially since the student worker helping with webpages is graduating in December.

So far, this has been an engaging project. It’s great to talk to faculty about their scholarship and how the University at large can promote their work through the UNL Digital Commons. It has also opened new conversations on social media such as managing the law college and law library’s online presence, and learning how faculty want to connect with colleagues and students or that gray line between personal versus professional information online.

It’s not actually a holiday, but for me Open Access Week seems more exciting than ever this year. There’s lots going on during this 5th annual international advocacy event, which runs from October 24-30. Here are a few highlights:

• Kicking things off last week, John Dupuis over at Confessions of a Science Librarian blogged about one strategy that researchers can use to regain control of their scholarly communications: blogging. (I’m not entirely sure, but I believe this was the first use of the #occupyscholcomm hashtag, which continues in heavy rotation on Twitter this week.)
• In her column over at Inside Higher Ed, our own Barbara Fister shares the gory details of the price increases for her library’s subscriptions to ACS and Sage journal packages. And she’s not the only one — others are taking up the call to make the rapidly increasing price tags for scholarly communication public. So many of our colleagues outside of the library are still unaware of these high and growing prices, and sharing this information is vital to our advocacy for open access.
• Alex Holcombe, a Psychologist at the University of Sydney, has created a lovely, simple way for faculty and researchers to demonstrate their open access advocacy: the Open Access Pledge. Holcombe’s pledge calls for scholars to commit to doing peer review primarily (though not exclusively) for open access publications (both gold and green). It’s a simple pledge that calls on us to recognize that our volunteer peer review efforts have an impact on the economics of scholarly publishing, and we can use our labor to help address the disparities in access to research and scholarship.
• Last but certainly not least: a little humor always makes difficult discussions easier, even discussions about the frustrations and challenges of scholarly communication. So if you’re on Twitter you should most definitely follow @OpenAccessHulk, who will SMASH TOLL ACCESS PUBLISHING.

Lots of libraries feature special programming for Open Access Week (including mine). If your library’s hosting events or programs this week, please share the details below. Happy Open Access Week, everyone!

Librarianship is a collaborative field. We’re always trying to collaborate with someone–teaching faculty, IT people, students, even (gasp!) other librarians. In terms of librarian scholarship, co-authored and multi-authored works are common if not the norm.

When it’s time to evaluate multi-authored works for reappointment, tenure and promotion, how do we estimate contribution and assign credit? Does a co-authored work “count” as half of a sole authored work? Is someone who has a lot of multi-authored works “padding” their CV, or are they master collaborators? When writers collaborate, are they merely dividing the labor, or has some synergy occurred and have they produced something that neither could have produced on their own? Do we need to be doing more to promote and reward effective librarian collaboration in scholarship?

I could be wrong, but I don’t think we’ve had a law librarian appear as a guest here. So I was happy that Michael Ginsborg was willing to share some of his thoughts on how we might respond to the high cost of legal resources using … uh, legal remedies. His is, in a sense, a dissenting opinion from the association that he belongs to, but his commentary offers some thoughts on how we might consider involving consumer protection regulations in finding a solution to problems in scholarly communication. (How many of us have wondered, for example, whether there were anti-trust implications in the society that accredits chemistry programs selling to libraries the journals and databases that are required for accreditation? How many of us have framed support for FRPAA as a fair shake not just for strapped libraries, but for taxpayers?) I was eager to hear what he has to say. Thanks, Michael, for taking the time to share your thoughts.

“Why The Largest Publishers Require Us To Unite Efforts In Consumer Advocacy”
by Michael Ginsborg

In “Three Jermaids” (12/23/2010 NY Review of Books), Robert Darnton describes how exorbitant pricing of journal subscriptions has strained academic library budgets. Because academic libraries have had to spend much more on journals, they have much less to spend on monographs, including university press publications – with harmful consequences for scholarship. While he favors open access projects as a long-term remedy, Darnton observes that “prices of commercial journals continue to rise.” Do librarians have another remedy?

We do. We can resort to consumer advocacy, of the kind that my organization – the American Association of Law Libraries (AALL) – once embraced, but has since rejected. (See my arguments in the latest issue of AALL’s newsletter, and a rejoinder by two former AALL Presidents.) In 1969, law librarian Raymond Taylor published an article in the American Bar Association (ABA) Journal, “Law Book Consumers Need Protection.” Taylor was a member of AALL’s Committee on Relations with Publishers and Dealers. He identified deceptive and other unfair business practices by legal publishers to increase profits at their customers’ expense. His seminal article led the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to adopt legal guidelines for the law book publishing industry in 1975, with support from the ABA, several state bars, and AALL. The FTC could enforce the guidelines by administrative actions or lawsuits, and consumers of legal publication could also use them to sustain claims in class action lawsuits. The FTC rescinded these and other industry guidelines in 2000, but while in effect, the guidelines for legal publishers helped restore fair dealing in advertising, billing, and sales of legal publications. (AALL stills asks legal publishers to voluntarily follow A Guide to Fair Business Practices, despite a record of repeated violations.)

The former legal publishing guidelines were not designed to prevent or reverse escalating increases in the prices of legal subscriptions. Nevertheless, Taylor’s example sets a precedent for more sweeping action by all of us – librarians across the full spectrum of the profession. For we have the means to challenge not only unfair business practices among publishers, but also anti-competitive pricing of “bundled” subscriptions. (A publisher bundles subscriptions when it charges the subscribing library for a licensed group, or package, of electronic or print subscriptions, or both.)

All types of libraries incur substantial harm – individually and together – from non-disclosure clauses in the provisions of their licenses. Such provisions are but one example of unfair business conduct by publishing conglomerates. All types of libraries also face unsustainable price increases in subscription bundling from a handful of publishers that dominate their respective publishing markets. For instance, the three largest legal publishers occupy almost 90% of the legal publishing market in the U.S.. Thomson-Reuters/Legal has a 40% market share. Oligopolies, or dominant market shares, characterize the markets of publishers that license academic library subscriptions to scientific, medical, technical, scholarly, professional and trade publications, and that license public library subscriptions.

Do we have evidence that publishers leverage their dominant market positions to stifle competition from university presses and smaller publishers? If libraries cancel electronic or print subscriptions when renewing a licensing agreement, publishers typically require them to pay increased prices across remaining products and services of the licensed package. Even where a library might switch to lower-priced alternatives, this arrangement leaves it without savings to do so. Because the same publishers also demand non-disclosure, consumers can not disclose to each other the renewal terms of price increases or discounts for specific subscriptions. In oligopoly publishing markets, or markets with “dominant” publishers, such practices by publishers at least raise a credible appearance of creating barriers to entry by lower-priced competitors.

We can build upon the consumer advocacy movement that Taylor inspired, but only by working together, through a coalition. (My colleague Bryan Carson proposes a coalition to address unfair business practices.) As a coalition, we could investigate evidence of unfair and anti-competitive practices of the largest publishers. We could work together to achieve legal reforms, by raising public awareness, seeking FTC intervention, or even – as warranted by evidence – pursuing class action lawsuits.

We have a proud tradition of defending our values. We have never limited ourselves, as AALL now does, to supporting increased public availability of only government publication. We have equally valued increased public access to all forms of copyrighted publication. But we can not advance this more inclusive ideal, without a collective commitment to consumer advocacy.

Michael Ginsborg (michaelginsborg@yahoo.com) has been a law librarian and AALL member for over 20 years.

photo via Morguefile

Steven Bell kindly pointed me toward an interview published in InformationToday with Derk Haank, former Elsevier executive who now is CEO of Springer. I wrote about it earlier at Library Journal’s Academic Newswire, but now that it’s available online, I thought I’d share it here, in case you’re having trouble staying awake or suffer from low blood pressure.

Haank helped organize Springer’s acquisition of BioMedCentral and has introduced some open access options for authors publishing in Springer journals. But even though these moves have made Springer one of the largest OA publishers, he thinks it’s a tiny tributary to the glory that is STM publishing, a minor revenue stream, a sop to the cranks who oddly enough care about access to research. These are mostly in the biosciences, and won’t have much effect on the future, which in his crystal ball looks very much like the present. Scientists will continue to produce more and more publications (and Springer is happy to oblige by increasing their publishing program); scientists will need to access the literature to do their work, and libraries will simply have to find ways to fund access. Subscriptions will continue to power scholarly publishing because … well, the system we have now works just fine. Publishers have recognized that libraries are strapped, so they have given up highway robbery are no longer insisting on double-digit increases annually. But since they’re publishing more, libraries will have to pay more; that’s just the reality. And all that fuss we make – that’s just a negotiation strategy.

Some choice quotes:

“e-products are much less expensive to handle [than print]: They have no storage costs, the data comes with a catalogue, and our books come with MARC records.” (No muss, no fuss … hey, can’t we just have the business office run this thing? Think of the money we’d save.)

“The Big Deal is the best invention since sliced bread. I agree that there was once a serial pricing problem; I have never denied there was a problem. But it was the Big Deal that solved it . . . it corrected everything that went wrong in the serials crisis in one go: people were able to get back all the journals that they had had to cancel, and they gained access to even more journals in the process.” (All the journals that we don’t need that you can shake a stick at! Too bad it hasn’t worked out for anything the library used to buy that isn’t in the Deal.)

“Librarians need to accept that if they want access to a continually growing database, then costs will need to go up a little bit but not like in the days of the serials crisis. We try to accommodate our customers, but at a certain point, we will hit a wall.” (Hey, at least you’ll have company. Welcome to Flatland!)

“I am absolutely convinced that the traditional subscription model delivered through the intermediary services of the library or information department will remain the dominant model. You might be forgiven for thinking that the OA movement is a lot bigger than it is. That is because those people who want to change something are always more vocal than those who are happy with the way things are.” (Happy … like us? Oh, that’s right, our opinion doesn’t matter. We are but handmaidens.)

“Our first priority is to continue as we are.” (We’ve noticed.)

What’s interesting – and worth thinking about – is that he feels mandates are a genuine threat to business as usual, particularly those imposed by funders who provide billions of dollars for basic research. One more reason to agitate for FRPAA and to urge our colleagues in other departments to consider mandates, even those of us who are not at research-centric institutions.

More discussion is happening at the Library Society of the World’s online water cooler.
Image courtesy of Bob Fornal.

It’s Open Access Week, a time to “present the individual and collective benefits of free online access to research”. It’s a time to celebrate the many accomplishments and progress made on the scholarly communications front. And some of those accomplishments are indeed significant: SPARC; OA resolutions at a growing number of institutions; NIH policy requiring the public sharing of taxpayer-paid research; the possibilities for FRPPA; expanding numbers of open access journals; a growing number of fringe faculty who are speaking up about the inequities and failures of the current journal publishing system. There is some cause for optimism. There’s a lot going on this week based on my visit to the OA Week site. You can even buy an OA t-shirt.

So excuse me if I’m not in the mood to celebrate. I’m feeling frustrated. What else can you feel when the system is broken, you know that system must change, but there is little incentive for those perpetuating the system to change it for the better. This might be the first time I’ve posted about scholarly publishing (I have shared thoughts about the textbook publishing system here). Scholarly communications is in my current work portfolio and I take it seriously. But it is one small part of a much larger set of responsibilities for projects and initiatives across the spectrum of public, research and instruction services. So I’m hardly an expert, and compared to others I haven’t the time to dive deeply into all the issues and conversation. At best, I’m simply on the front lines trying to promote new possibilities in scholarly communications.

A few months ago I visited colleagues at another ARL library. At some point the conversation got around to scholarly communications and open access. I asked what they were working on, and how they were trying to create change on their campus. The response was something along the lines of “We tried all that a few years ago, and quite honestly none of our faculty showed any interest in changing their scholarly publishing behaviors. So now we’re just putting our energy elsewhere. When they are ready to change we’ll be here waiting to support them”. I wonder how many others have reached the same point.

To better understand our academic departments and their needs, I have an ongoing project of visiting department chairs (a few each semester). We simply have a discussion about their department, the library and how we might better serve their faculty and students. Our head of reference and instruction attends as well as the librarian who is the liaison to the department. Sometimes the chair invites other faculty or possibly a student to attend and participate. It is always a good conversation, and we learn quite a bit from each other. But when the conversation invariably turns to scholarly communications, I tend to feel more like a traveling salesmen speaking to a potential customer who really wants to get away from me. I wouldn’t even dare show my faculty colleagues something like this – as helpful as it may be – for fear of never being taken seriously again.

The good news is that most of the chairs and faculty I encounter are aware of the open access movement. Most aren’t really paying it much attention. I bring up the benefits, talk up the importance of public access – and remind them about our own walled garden. No one is opposed to open access publishing, they just don’t want to be the ones doing it. As I’ve now heard more than once, “I’m all for providing public access to my research, but what matters most – more than the possibility of thousands of hits on Google – is knowing that the 200 people that matter the most in my discipline read my article in our most prestigious journal – and that’s not going to happen if I publish in an open access journal in my field.” They also remind me that our institution’s tenure and merit process are quite clear about the importance of publishing in top tier, high attention-attracting journals.

I know there are some interesting new ideas about open access floating around out there, and Barbara mentions some of them here. Dorothea Salo shares some as well in an informative podcast interview with Roy Tennant. For much of the conversation Salo expresses her frustration with our lack of progress in creating change. Some things are beyond our control, but in other ways we can do better. For example, she says that we are at fault for poor communication that fails to make faculty aware of “the very real inequities and difficulties that their own behaviors cause.” Well, when I try do that I hit the brick wall of having faculty point at the current system, and acknowledging that it may be broken but they don’t want to be the ones to change it because it will potentially cost them their chance at tenure, a thousand dollar merit increase or a promotion to a more prestigious university. The Tennant-Salo interview ends on a more hopeful note with Salo seeing some signs that higher education (faculty bloggers, the occasional essay in IHE or the Chronicle) is starting to question the current system. I am feeling less optimistic.

These ideas are worth reading and thinking about, but any new ideas for fixing the broken publishing system must take into account the disciplinary prestige factor. If it fails to provide an adequate substitute for it, then the majority of faculty will not buy into that new system. My hope now is that the best prospects for widespread change in the scholarly publishing world will have to wait until the current crop of millennial students are the dominant faculty. I have to believe the current generation of college students, with their better grasp of a social Internet, will refuse to support our current closed system. The other scenario for change is something we recently had a glimpse of in this article that discussed the impact of shrinking library budgets on scientists’ access to the journal literature. When our academic libraries no longer have the funding to sustain the current system, except perhaps for the few elite institutions that could afford it, faculty may then take notice that the current system is broken. They may then be motivated to accept that an open access journal could meet their need for prestige and merit.

I find all this particularly frustrating because I am a believer in the power of design thinking to help us come up with solutions to what is referred to as a wicked problem – something with no obvious or possible solution because the problem is ambiguous and shifting in nature. In an essay I wrote about design thinking I used the scholarly communications crisis as my example of the wicked problem and how we needed to turn option A and option B – neither of which solves the problem – into the more workable option C (a process referred to Roger Martin as “integrative thinking“). But I fail to see how even a design thinking approach can get us out of the scholarly publishing mess if the players in the system, as currently structured, mostly fail to acknowledge that we’ve got a wicked problem. In order for a design thinking approach to work we need to agree that there is a problem, and then we can begin to go through the process to identify a solution. I continue to get the old “it is what it is” response, as if this is the way it has to be and there are no possible solutions worth exploring.

Despite my current frustrations over the difficulty in getting faculty excited about the possibilities for change in scholarly publishing I’m not about to give up on it entirely. That’s not just because it’s part of my job, but I inherently believe it’s the right position to take on the issues. I hope that when I next post about scholarly communications I’ll have more reason to get in the spirit of Open Access Week.

This month marks the second in our new series of guest posts from academic librarians around the biblioblogosphere. October’s post is from Iris Jastram, the Reference & Instruction Librarian for Languages and Literature at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. She also blogs at Pegasus Librarian.

While we were all busy wondering what it means to be a librarian in the Age of Google, we got flanked. This is not the Age of Google after all. That was just a distraction — a clever and dazzling light show. Meanwhile, behind the curtain, a totally different age was gathering itself: The Age of Big Access.

We saw and were outraged by Elsevier’s extortionist tactics. You know the story: our scholarly communities can’t function without these journals. We needed to provide access, Elsevier knows we needed to provide access, and so we have no leverage. The part of our librarianly DNA that is hardwired to provide access and further scholarly pursuits kicks in and overrides everything else.

We saw and were outraged by OCLC’s revised Use and Transfer guidelines. Sure, we could decide not to hand the record over to OCLC, but then the other systems that we really do need (such as ILL) wouldn’t work as well. We couldn’t lend our items, which means we couldn’t build up credits, which means that we couldn’t afford to borrow as much. Our scholarly community would suffer. We need to provide access, OCLC knows we need to provide access, and so we have no leverage. That librarianly DNA kicks in again.

We saw and were outraged by EBSCO’s increasing holdings of exclusive rights to periodicals, often offered through increasingly obscure EBSCO aggregators. But we need to provide access, the journals know it, they contract with EBSCO to get as much out of EBSCO as they can, we have no leverage. That blasted librarianly DNA keeps kicking in.

We saw and were outraged by Nature Publishing Group’s price hikes, made public by the University of California system when that system announced a boycott (PDF) of all of Nature’s periodicals and Nature-related activities. How dare Nature sell our own work back to us at such a price, we asked. Because we need to provide access to these things, Nature knows it, and so we have no leverage. Is there any way to amputate DNA?

We saw and were outraged by OCLC yet again when a lawsuit reminded us just how often we have no choice of vendor now that OCLC controls our cataloging, ILL, and to a lesser but growing extent, our catalogs. Apparently librarianly DNA loves these parasitic relationships around providing access.

And weren’t we just talking about how we’re no longer gatekeepers now that there’s so much free information out there? What about information overload and result fatigue? Have we wondered and worried about our futures so long that the future got written by big corporations in the business of selling us access, and selling it to us again, and then selling it to us again?

As usual, Barbara Fister is way ahead of me with her Liberation Bibliography manifesto. But what about me? I don’t have an activist bone in my body, but surely recognizing that I’m living the wrong future must have some effect. Surely there’s a place for instruction librarians in this alternate future.

I was pretty comfortable with my role as an instruction librarian in the Age of Google. I’m totally at sea trying to figure out my role as an instruction librarian in the Age of Big Access.

One outcome of the Netflix discussion that took place in the library community is that there seems to be general agreement that adhering to licensing agreements is the right thing for academic librarians to do for a number of good reasons. Not only is it a good way to avoid a potential lawsuit from Netflix or a movie studio, but it sets the right example for students and faculty. How can we expect them to abide by fair use guidelines and licensing agreements if the campus librarians are openly flouting them. We need to take the moral high ground, even if Netflix represents a reasonably good solution to the DVD distribution challenge.

So I find it interesting that this blogger is complaining about not having access to JSTOR as an alumnus of some college or university. Dr. Koshary writes:

I didn’t think this would happen, now that I’m out of grad school, but I’m feeling a fresh surge of hatred for Dear Old University. I tried to log in to JSTOR to look up an article, and found that I no longer have access to JSTOR through my DOU affiliation.

I’m pretty sure Dr. Koshary knows that JSTOR is a restricted database, and that most libraries are prohibited from allowing alumni to gain access (unless they make some sort of arrangement which likely isn’t cheap – and Dr. Khosary suspects his alma mater has such an agreement). At the end of the rant against his alma mater he asks:

I don’t suppose any of my readers has a better/cheaper idea for me to regain access to JSTOR?

Turns out they do, and most of those offering advice don’t seem too concerned about taking the moral high ground – or even abiding by their university or library’s guidelines for sharing accounts:

Do what everybody I know who’s been in your position has done: get a friend who has access to a research library and its databases to share their log-in and password with you. I know I’ve helped a few people out in this way, and I’ve done it with a spring in my step and a song in my heart. Sure, it’s technically “wrong” but I’d argue that it’s more wrong to charge underemployed people money for access to scholarly resources.

I just ran into this, where my new school has some journal accesses but not many, and I crowdsourced it on facebook — some current Gradschooland students offered me their proxy server login, and another was already in the library and emailed me the pdf.

Everyone does it. Hell, I’ll give you MY login if you want

Virtually everyone I know who’s not employed by a top-tier R1 has a bootlegged EEBO account: through friends who are still grad students, advisors, or friends with cushier jobs.

Makes you wonder why we even bother with licensing agreements in the first place? As long as you can get it for free somewhere else that’s all that matters. Just how rampant is this practice? Wish I had a way to do an anonymous poll of faculty, grad students and alums to see how many think it’s all right to provide or take an account to give someone else free access to restricted resources. Based on this post – probably a lot more than we think. So much for setting good examples.

Over the past academic year I’ve worked on a research project with a colleague to study the ways that students do their scholarly work, similar to the project at the University of Rochester a few years ago. We finished with data collection for this year and are spending the summer analyzing our results. We’ve gotten an additional grant and plan to collect data at a few more sites next year; ultimately we’ll produce a comprehensive analysis of all of our data. But in the short term, we’d like to share our preliminary results and analysis from this year’s research.

Here’s my dilemma: the fastest and most efficient way to disseminate our results is to share them on the website we’ve set up for the project. When I was an archaeologist we wrote up an interim report after each field season and a final report when the project was complete, and I’m thinking along these lines. However, I’m also a junior faculty member on the road to tenure, and the currency of the realm is, of course, the peer-reviewed journal article.

A peer-reviewed article will take considerably more time to be published, up to a year or even longer, especially if our submission isn’t accepted on the first try (as seems true for most article manuscripts). I’m a strong advocate of open access publishing, and it just seems wrong to keep our data to ourselves for all that time. But I do value the peer review process, and while I hope that posting a report on our website would generate comments, there’s no guarantee.

Ideally I’d like to write both a preliminary report, to be posted online by the end of the summer, and a scholarly article, submitted around the same time and (hopefully) published sometime next year. I’m not sure that we have time for both, though. While the summer months are slower in the library, we’re still open, and there are classes and reference desk shifts to staff and programs to plan for next year. So we are probably going to have to focus our energies on just one publication.

As I’ve been thinking on this recently there’s been lots of other news in the world of academic publishing. The University of California proposed a possible faculty boycott of the Nature Publishing Group. And an unusual scholarly publishing project came out of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University: Hacking the Academy, a book that gathered all of its submissions in just one week. I can’t help but think that we’re in an odd scholarly communication moment right now, stuck between old and new worlds of knowledge dissemination, and I’m not always sure how to chart my course.