The ACRLog had a short piece this weekend on librarians and open access. Barbara Fister mentioned reading in Current Cites about a U. of California study noting the discrepancy between the words and deeds of faculty when it comes to information access, then trying to link out from Current Cites to another possibly interesting sounding article from the Journal of Academic Librarianship and finding a shopping cart. When I tried it, I got the article, but that’s because it seems to be written into our library’s charter that we subscribe to everything no matter how much an individual publisher might gouge us. (Not that I’m saying Science Direct gouges us.) She rightly wonders “Why do so few librarians bother to put our words into action? Maybe because it’s work? Maybe because nobody says you have to? Maybe because we’re hypocrites?”
This problem has bothered me for a long time. I’ve never been on the tenure track, so I’ve never had a requirement to publish. If I write something, it’s because I want to write it. Since I don’t do anything even remotely related to social science or statistics, there isn’t much discursive space in the library literature for me anyway. Regardless, years ago I decided that whenever possible I would write only for open access library journals. As an academic librarian who has discussed these issues with professors and tried to promote the idea of open access, I have also wondered why so few library journals are openly accessible.
That includes the offerings from the ALA. American Libraries isn’t openly accessible. I don’t often read it, because I read almost no journals in print now and going through the member signup page and navigating Ebrary isn’t worth the trouble. It especially bothered me that the ACRL publications weren’t openly accessible, though that seems to be changing. C&RL is mostly accessible now. When I visited the site for the current issue, I saw a notice about full text articles: “The full-text of these articles are available to current ACRL members only. You will need your password to access them.” But they were all available without my password. Maybe there’s a category of article not available.
Back to Fister’s question, why don’t we put our words into action? I suspect it’s for the same reason most other fields don’t. If one has to publish to keep one’s job, and publishing in the most respected journals is the best way to impress people, then that’s where people will try to publish if they can. Why take a chance on Library Philosophy and Practice or E-JASL when you can publish in standard journals like the Journal of Academic Librarianship that people have heard of. I suspect that fear keeps people from changing, the fear that publishing in a little known journal won’t look as good come review time.
There is one silver lining to this cloud. At least library journals don’t cost $10K a volume.
Actually, there is one library journal that does cost $10K a volume…from Emerald (big surprise there). Last time I checked, it was well over the $10K mark. I won’t mention the name; no point in providing extra publicity.
I guess I should revise that to MOST library journals don’t cost that much.
Open access self-archiving (“Green OA”) is another option that’s available, as an alternative to open access publishing (“Gold OA”). The SHERPA/RoMEO database provides relevant information. For example, the publisher of the Journal of Academic Librarianship, Elsevier, “is a RoMEO green publisher“, and the “author can archive post-print (ie final draft post-refereeing)“.
Self-archiving is a great idea, though I’m not sure it does much to control serial costs. My worry is for those scholars who don’t have access to an institutional repository. I just fear that a lot of self-archived material still won’t be accessible in a stable place for a long period of time.
I did publish in Library Philosophy & Practice, in part because it’s an open-access journal. (It also happened to be doing something on a theme that I was interested in; it’s nice when CFPs and my interests dovetail like that.)
I don’t know what, if any, impact that’ll have come review time. Mostly, though, as much as I can with being on the tenure track, I want to avoid publication solely for publication’s sake. I’d rather write something useful to the profession and to our body of scholarship.
I’ve also published a couple of articles in LPP, first because it’s open access, and second because they have a space for philosophical reflection rather than data driven research, which I couldn’t do well and wouldn’t want to do anyway. I’ll probably submit something to E-JASL as well because they’re open access, and I wouldn’t want to be seen as publishing everything in the same journal. But I would think in a tenure track position, especially at some of the tougher places, the reputation of the journal would matter. If a friend of mine up for tenure had published in these relatively obscure and new journals instead of Reference Librarian or RUSQ, I think she would have a harder time in the process. For me, publication isn’t unnecessary, though it is rewarded some.