Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Scholars--Don't give away your work for free: Synthesizing many scholarly communication issues tonight

It seems like scholars and researchers are finally starting to get the point that they shouldn't be giving away their work for free to commercial publishers who then sell back that content to libraries, at often-times huge profits.  Libraries do not exist to make sure that commercial publishers can rake in huge amounts of cash for their stakeholders.

This even holds true for non-profit societies such as the American Chemical Society who act as if they are a commercial outfit.  See this Chronicle article (temporary full text access) and Jenica's posts about them on her blog and in CHMNINF.  Other bullies have also been recently outed.  [Edited to add: The ACS is scared of the new information environment (including social networking sites such as blogs and Twitter (and discussion lists?) where they can't control all of the terms and the language of librarians.  They respond with fear, uncertainty and doubt to attack librarians who dare question their position.]

In other Open Access news, the SCOAP3 deal seems to be moving along. 

I just finished reading Peter Suber's book on Open Access.  Thankfully, John wrote a great overview of the book similar to what I was going to say.  In the next day or seven, I will try to compare and contrast Suber's OA book with Walt Crawford's OA book.  As John notes, they are complementary, and do not compete for the same audience.  Both are very worthwhile reads.

[Another edit: I forgot to mention all of the stuff going on around the American Historical AssociationFun reading.  Especially the post from Barbara.]

Good night.