A quick note to preface this post: Thank you, Dylan Burns. After reading your post–What We Know and What They Know: Scholarly Communication, Usability, and Un-Usability–I can’t stop thinking about this weird nebula of article access, entitlement, ignorance, and resistance. Your blog post has done what every good blog post should do: Make me think. If you haven’t read Dylan’s post yet, stop, go back, and read. You’ll be better for it. I promise.
I am an instruction librarian, so everything that I read and learn about within the world of library and information science is filtered through a lens of education and pedagogy. This includes things like Dylan Burns’ latest blog post on access to scholarship, #TwitterLibraryLoan, and other not-so-legal means of obtaining academic works. He argues that faculty who use platforms like #Icanhazpdf or SciHub are not “willfully ignorant or disloyal to their institutions, libraries, or librarians. They just want what they want, when they want it,” and that “We as librarians shouldn’t ‘teach’ our patrons to adapt to our obtuse and oftentimes difficult systems but libraries should adapt to the needs of our patrons.”
My initial reaction was YES, BUT…which means I’m trying to think of a polite way to express dissent. Thankfully, Dylan’s always up for a good Twitter discussion, so here’s what ensued:
My gut reaction to libraries giving people “what they want, when they want it” is always going to be non-committal. I’ve never been one to subscribe to what a colleague a long time ago referred to as “eat your peas librarianship” (credit: Michelle Boulé). I don’t think things should be difficult just for the sake of being difficult because things were hard for me, and you youngin’s should have to face hardships too! But I am also enough of a parent to know that giving people what they want when they want it without telling them how it got there is going to cause a lot of problems (and possibly temper-tantrums) later on. Here’s where the education librarian in me emerges: I don’t want scholars to just be able to get what they want when they need/want it without understanding the deeper problems within the arguably broken scholarly publishing model. In other words, I want to advocate for Lydia Thorne’s model of educating scholars about scholarly publishing problems. To which Dylan responds:
I think faculty are aware of the problems and the illegality of scihub etc. I think they weigh that against the need to publish and produce, to then be part of the system that causes the problems in the first place.
— Dylan Burns (@ForgetTheMaine) December 14, 2017
I wonder if we annoy our patrons when we spend these moments teaching when they just really need access right now to do their jobs? And maybe that’s why they turn to the other systems.
— Dylan Burns (@ForgetTheMaine) December 14, 2017
To which I can only respond:
But how can RIGHTEOUS EDUCATION EVER BE ANNOYING, DYLAN!?!?!?
— V. Arellano Douglas (@arellanover) December 14, 2017
Point: Dylan. Those of us who teach have all had the experience of trying to turn an experience into a teaching moment, only to be met by rolling eyes, blank stares, sighs, huffs, etc. Is the scholarly publishing system so broken that even knowing about the problems with platforms like SciHub, scholars will still engage in the piracy of academic works because, well, it’s all a part of the game they need to play? Is this even an issue of usability then? Creating extremely user-friendly library systems won’t change the fact that some libraries simply can’t afford the resources their community wants/needs, but those scholars still need to engage in the system that produces that resources. Is it always going to be a lose-lose for libraries?
At this point a friend of mine enters the Twitter discussion. Jonathan Jackson is an instructor of neurology and researcher at Massachusetts General Hospital:
I think for some of us, there’s also a need to take on the system in some small way by using scihub or #icanhazpdf. It’s not only an issue of “which is easier/faster?” but sometimes “I / my colleague *can’t* access this journal any other way.”
— Jonathan Jackson (@egaly) December 14, 2017
For many science researchers, I think leveraging these resources are a way of calling attention to the unequal / inequitable access that paywalls bring.
— Jonathan Jackson (@egaly) December 14, 2017
I’d say many of us are conscious of our actions – it’s a political stance about access & inequity rather than not wanting to wait or navigate a library interface. I primarily use Harvard’s system for myself, but leverage these alternate networks when the action is more visible.
— Jonathan Jackson (@egaly) December 14, 2017
Prior to this conversation I’d not thought about #TwitterLibraryLoan and similar efforts at not-so-legal access to scholarship as acts of resistance, but Jonathan’s entrance into the discussion forced me to think about the power of publicly asking for pdfs. I’ll admit that part of me skeptical that all researchers are as politically conscious as Jonathan and his colleagues. I’m sure there are some folks who just need that article asap and don’t care how they get it. But there is power in calling out that one publisher or that one journal again and again on #ICanHazPDF because your library will never be able to afford that subscription.
I’ll admit that the whole Twitter exchange made me second guess motivations all around, which is what a good discussion should do, right?
Very much enjoyed reading this post! I’ve always seen learning about copyright as a fundamental part of wider of information literacy (we call it copyright literacy) and you are so right that we do sometimes need to teach people why they can or can’t have access to content not just supply them with it. I think the issue is so many academic colleagues behave in contradictory ways when teaching and needing to give students access to something (what do you mean I can’t just upload the chapter or pdf to the course website?) And when they publish and merrily assign copyright to a publisher. We’re trying to find ways to have those conversations with the faculty in the UK! Ian’s created a board game called The Publishing Trap which is on our website.
While every reference interaction may not be the place to have educational conversations about the marketplace and accessibility of research and information, it IS important to have these conversations with faculty and admin. Faculty, to some extent, do have some choices about where they publish and how. Not always, but sometimes. Choosing avenues that offer greater access to users or retaining rights to certain version of your research articles (and then making it publicly available) are ways that we can encourage and work with faculty to make information more accessible.