Not That Kind of Librarian

Are Librarians Ready?

Last week, David Willetts, a MP in the UK, made an speech calling for free, open access to research. At the time of this announcement, I was attending the Spring Conference of the International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers (STM). My role at the meeting was to serve on a panel of librarians made up of: Ivy Anderson (CDL), Steven Gass (MIT), Lorraine Haricombe (Univ of Kansas) to respond to questions from the publishing community. To be honest, we were expecting questions regarding costs of journals and the continued viability of the big purchasing deals. However, in light of the David Willetts announcement, one of the first series of questions were: “Are libraries and librarians ready for a scholarly information world where the majority of academic scholarship is open access and freely available? Would such an information environment mean the end to libraries and librarians?” 

Our collective response was yes, there is still a role for librarians in a mostly freely available information environment. There are still strong needs for instruction for evaluating available resources, subject portal access for helping to define relevant sources, and metadata control. The full exchange will be be presented here. However, as a profession, it appears this question is being tap danced around. In all of the strategic planning and scenario planning occurring in libraryland, is this an outcome for which we are professionally preparing for?

Subsequently, STM has issued this statement regarding sustainable open access. 

Elsevier & My Rights as an Author

I’m working on a column that will appear in a title that is an imprint of Elsevier. Once again, there was quite a bit of Elsevier bashing at the recent American Library Associations Midwinter conference in Dallas over their rights and permissions allowed to authors and their support of the Research Works Act. So, I’m looking at these rights as I’m sure to have sign something for this invited column. Yes, I do have to waive my copyright rights to them. For this column, an interview with various librarians, I’m not overly concerned with the waiver as I would be if it was more of a research question/issue paper. Perhaps I should be but it is a high impact journal in my field and I’m once again on tenure track so I’m more interested in gaining the citation than the loss of post print rights.

I’m reviewing my rights here: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authorsview.authors/rights

One of the issues with this web site is that there is at least one broken link here. For instance, when I try to click on this link:    Download your practical guide to Elsevier’s copyright policy.

I get a page not found error.

However, I can review article posting policies here: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authorsview.authors/postingpolicy

From this link I learn, I can post the preprint & the accepted author manuscript to my repository. This is good news for me as I’ve already started self archiving on the PSU digital repository of some short mentions of another research project.

This policy counters a remark made at the SPARC session at ALAMW that appeared to indicate that this option was no longer available and had been removed from the agreement. I did find a draft agreement here: http://www.elsevier.com/framework_authors/pdfs/JPA_example.pdf

This also indicates that I retain these rights; so I’m thinking I perhaps misheard the comment made during the SPARC meeting that this language was now being blocked or changed.

Furthermore, Elsevier lists these funding body agreements & policies: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/authorsview.authors/fundingbodyagreements

Again, while they are a signer of the Research Works Act, it does not appear that they’re currently changing their policies in regards to what they’ve always done with repositories and the current mandates. Given this, I’m moving forward with the column since a number of people have already put work into making it happen and in the end, I selfishly get what I want most, the citation and the impact factor.

For further information on the greater Research Works Act discussion taking place:

From a recent discussion on LibLicense, T.Scott Plutchak,  Director, Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences University of Alabama at Birmingham noted:

“ I was pleased to see Alicia’s reference to the fact that Elsevier has been depositing final manuscripts on behalf of their authors for many years.  I recall a conversation I had with someone from NLM about a year or so into the voluntary policy where he told me that the only reason that they had reached a 7% compliance rate was because of Elsevier’s voluntary participation.  Without that it would’ve been more like 3% to 3.5%.  And remember, this is PRIOR to the mandatory policy.  I realize this disrupts the convenient narrative of evil anti-OA Elsevier striving to lock up all the scientific literature in the world.  I understand how upsetting that must be.”

In another email Scott Plutchak adds:

“The principles I’d like to see incorporated into public access policies are recommended in the report from the Scholarly Publishing Roundtable (January 2010).  The report (and related materials) can be found on the AAU website: http://www.aau.edu/policy/scholarly_publishing_roundtable.aspx”

In the same discussion thread on LibLicense, Dr. Alicia Wise wrote: “Just a short note to mention that legally enshrined government mandates create an inflexible framework and of course can only be changed through law.”

There is a very thoughtful article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the Research Works Act that was published on 22 January and can be accessed here: http://chronicle.com/article/Who-Gets-to-See-Published/130403/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

It will be interesting to see what traction this legislation gains in an election year and if any changes really occur.

Wondering

How much Pandora airtime REM got yesterday. Where could you find that out?