T Scott "Bridges the Gap"
T Scott has an thoughtful post about an upcoming talk he will be giving to the good people of Elsevier.
I applaud the effort, and as T Scott points out, I appreciate the efforts of Elsevier to recognize that librarians are one of their core market groups. It makes sense for them to play nice with us.
However, as I am REPEATEDLY told, I am young, and headstrong, and naive (gentle reader, you may or may not have caught these threads in my blogging, ha ha).
I believe, I think, I feel in my 31-year-old-anything-is-possible bones that the time of publishers as we know them is passing, just like I believe, I think, and I feel that the time of libraries as we know them is passing. Our fates are intertwined (like Gollum and the Ring, but that may not be a positive metaphor).
Information wants to be free. Institutional repositories, run by librarians, can help make this happen. NIH can make this happen. The whole Open Access movement can make this happen.
I am not saying that it will happen tomorrow, primarily because many of the researchers and most of the librarians of today are Baby Boomers. They grew up and made their places in the world based on the old model. Today's smart PhD students want to get into PLoS or PLoM, and they want their articles in DSpace so they're findable in Google Scholar. Flexible librarians are making this possible.
At some point, the entire process will reach critical mass and the world as we know it will be gone.
Now, as we walk away from high journal prices, we also to some extent walk away from the peer review structure, the permanent record of research, and in many cases, the concept of "authority" as we know it. This is scary, and problematic, but the fact is that peer review is flawed in a variety of ways and authority can be conferred through other means.
To come back to T Scott: I wish him well. I'm sure he'll speak fairly and eloquently about the issues that face publishers and librarians alike. In my dream world, Scott speaks and the Elsevier folk look at each other and say, wow, we can do so much more together than we can apart. A new day dawns where we all work together to face the new reality, and we usher it in on golden wings instead of fighting it--and each other--all the way.
4 comments:
Well, that makes me smile. In my dream world the most I hope for is that I have an interesting time. My suspicion is that the people I will be talking to will be, by and large, too rooted in the day to day problems of meeting this quarter's sales targets to be swayed by anything I might say about the future.
However, I will be trying to make many of the points that you suggest -- that the days of acquiring research results by purchasing articles (however they're packaged) are disappearing quickly and that publishers (just as librarians) have got to do some serious and creative thinking about what their role in the whole scholarly communication chain should be.
Hey, I agree with every word but don't be slamming the Baby Boomer librarians, of which I am one. Our hipness might be in doubt but our hearts are often in the right place. I root for open access as much as anyone. Keep on tellin' it like it is, Whitney. Right on! Groovey!
Jan,
Thanks for your comment! I certainly did not mean to tar all Baby Boomer librarians with the same unhip brush; I was intending to say that change over the next few years will be slow and incremental because there are more people invested in the current system than there are people invested in a new model.
I probably should have left age out altogether and said that there are currently two or more people invested in the exisiting system for every one who--like you, Jan Rock Star!--are looking toward the future.
Whitney
No doubt true. Sad but true. JAN
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