Blogging by and for academic and research librarians
Congratulations to all the open access activists and to everyone who contacted their congressional representatives in support of the NIH’s plan to archive published research funded by NIH grants. We won!
As one commenter at a lively thread over at Slashdot said, ever so wisely, “All your research are belong to allofus.”
There are some interesting responses showing up to LC’s draft report on the future of bibliographic control. Karen Schneider, Roy Tennant, and (in great depth) Diane Hillmann have weighed in. So has Tim Spaulding of LibraryThing, who urges the Library of Congress – and libraries generally – to make bibliographic records open for reuse. He points to a petition that argues for the virtues of open records.
Bibliographic records are a key part of our shared cultural heritage. They too should therefore be made available to the public for access and re-use without restriction. Not only will this allow libraries to share records more efficiently and improve quality more rapidly through better, easier feedback, but will also make possible more advanced online sites for book-lovers, easier analysis by social scientists, interesting visualizations and summary statistics by journalists and others, as well as many other possibilities we cannot predict in advance.
Government agencies and public institutions are increasingly making data open. We strongly encourage the Library of Congress to join this movement by recommending that more bibliographic data is made available for access, re-use and re-distribution without restriction.
I’d love to hear what academic librarians say about all this. I’d especially love to hear from academic libraries that are using LibraryThing for Libraries. What have been the benefits? How have people responded?
A lot of us think the NIH is right to open up federally-funded research. Is open the way to go for LC, too?
I’ve become a little cynical about politics of late, but the recent Senate vote for an appropriations bill that includes mandatory deposit of publications resulting from NIH-funded research has cheered me up.
As I mentioned earlier, Senator James Inhofe (who famously called global warming a “hoax” and is currently celebrating the failure of the Dream Act) tried to derail it with a couple of amendments, but in the end he withdrew them and the bill passed by a whopping 75 – 19 margin. This doesn’t mean it’s veto-proof; as Peter Suber has pointed out, the House vote was less decisive and the two bills need to be reconciled – and Inhofe hasn’t given up yet. Still, it’s a positive step forward. We could have a law by the end of the year.
Meanwhile, Charles Bailey did some sleuthing and uncovered the fact that Inhofe has been getting some nice support from Reed Elsevier, which in 2006 spent over $3 million on lobbying. Salon picked up the story. (Hat tip to Scott Walter!)
First – if you support the NIH plan to make tax-funded research publicly available, take a minute to call your senators. Right now. There are some amendments to be voted on today that could gut the NIH proposal. Tell them to vote no on Senator James Inhofe’s amendments #3416 and #3417 to the 2008 Labor-HHS-Education bill.
Okay – are you done? Good.
Now, here’s some other news about access to research. The Chronicle reports that humanists will have a place to share their work in progress just as scholars in the social sciences have done for over ten years. This site for sharing documents is something between informal blogging and formal publication – more like a conference presentation without the hotel bill or airfare to pay for. The social sciences have had such an Internet forum since the SSRN was founded in 1994. There, some 131,000 papers have had over 4 million downloads in the past year. These are clustered into “networks” – rather like conferences – where people working in related areas can share their work. If you look toward the bottom of the page, classics, US and British literature, and philosophy have new networks. It looks as if these will be spun off into a new HRN – Humanities Research Network.
I’m not that familiar with how SSRN works and would be interested in hearing from anyone who has an insider’s view. All I know is that I’ve downloaded a lot of good articles from there, so I’m happy to see it expand into new fields.
Reading Current Cites this morning I had to laugh (in a rueful way). It includes a summary of the now well-known survey done by the University of California’s Office of Scholarly Communication that found faculty may be on board when it comes to accessing information but their behavior doesn’t match. They don’t want to be forced to engage in open access practices and rarely bother to do it voluntarily. Oh, for shame!
The next item, from the Journal of Academic Librarianship sounded interesting – about linking practice and research in academic libraries. The DOI took me here.
Nice to have such a handy shopping cart, but if we’re expecting other faculty to take action, why won’t we do it ourselves? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve run into this. Even Elsevier allows authors to post preprint versions of articles on the Web (albeit with some weird and inconvenient rules). We know the stakes. Why do so few librarians bother to put our words into action?
Maybe because it’s work? Maybe because nobody says you have to? Maybe because we’re hypocrites?