Librarians, Publishing Behavior, & Open Access

[Jill Emery <Jill.Emery@mail.uh.edu>]

Chuck & Others,

First, why is it, that as a profession, we are so unwilling to make
allowances for the tremendous costs that a publisher had to undertake to
shift their whole operational base from print journal production to online
journal production? In the 1990's every major publisher was in the process
of figuring out what their niche would be in the scholarly publishing
market place, ceasing some titles, merging others, developing new, more
internationally based content, and attempting to develop an online
presence for their content. All of these endeavors required the
expenditure of significant amounts of money. Have we learned nothing from
our initial attempts at the development of institutional repositories at
our individual campuses? What is amazing to me is that our profession can
attack the for-profit publishing world for cost-gouging while at the same
time be admitting to ourselves that undertaking the management and
maintenance of scholarly publication online is a very expensive and
skill-intensive activity.

Second, in relation to open access publication, the one area where we, as
a profession, have been most vocal, we have also been most hypocritical.
How many library and information science journals are truly open access?
How many of these are actually published/provided in the United States? It
took pressure last year for ALA/ACRL to even make open access articles in
C&RL & C&RL News freely available to the profession. None of the
publications from ALA are fully open access despite their lip service to
be proponents of open access endeavors.

You are quite right to question if we, as a profession, will act any
differently than any other faculty in regards to truly examining and
changing our publication habits. However, I also see nothing to be gained
from maintaining the "us" against "them" scenario in relation to
librarians and for-profit publishers. There is more ground to be gained
from working with the for-profit publishing community than in continually
calling them out for trying to maintain viability in an increasingly
complex marketplace.

-Jill Emery

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Jill Emery
Director, Electronic Resources Program
University of Houston
114 University Libraries
Houston, TX 77204-2000
713.743.9765
713.743.9778 (fax)
JEmery@uh.edu
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