Ludicrously closed access; or how to alienate readers and look foolish

Posted on 23 September 2008
Filed under Libraries, Open access, Publishing
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It started with a post the liblicense mailing list, announcing a new journal entitled the Journal of Electronic Resources Librarianship. The journal, the post said, was published by the Haworth Press (a subsidiary of Taylor & Francis since its acquisition last year). The inaugural issue had been released, according to the announcement, and it appeared to include an article on open access (Ross Singer, “Opening Up Access to Open Access”), so I wanted to check out the article to see if it was something worth posting at OAN.

Oddly, the post pointed to a Web site for the journal which is run on the Open Journal Systems platform — software designed for open access journals. This was odd for two reasons:

I didn’t know Haworth published OA journals (and the announcement didn’t refer to the journal as OA)
The Web site actually contained no OA content (although the inaugural issue had been released)

My confusion was resolved upon determining that the journal is not, in fact, OA. (I’m still not clear what the point of the OJS site is.)

So I searched for the article, to see if it was available from the Haworth site or if it had been self-archived by the author. Google did find a link on the Haworth site (I’d link to the DOI handle, but it doesn’t resolve), but the article isn’t available OA; in fact, not even an abstract is available. Google didn’t find a self-archived version of the article. It did seem to find a Web site for the author, although the site doesn’t point to a copy of the article or even mention it. Nor could I find a copy in the apparent author’s institutional repository (nor any other papers by the author). Since the article’s from a library-related journal, I tried E-LIS, but again, nothing by the author.

So apparently there are no OA versions of the article available, or even an abstract. But the announcement noted that a complimentary copy of the inaugural issue was available. I emailed to request a copy, and eventually received a reply:

Can you please send me your mailing address?

Having little interest in waiting several more days (at least) to get my hands on the article, I replied:

Can you send me an electronic copy?

And, can you believe it — here’s the response from T&F:

We do not have electronic copies available. You can only view the journal online if you already have a subscription. Sorry for any inconvenience.

In summary: neither gold nor green OA; no abstract; and the sample issue is available in print form only. For an article about open access!

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Podcast of my talk at Simmons library school

Posted on 16 August 2008
Filed under Academia, Libraries, Open access, Open government
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Simmons College’s Graduate School of Library and Information Science has posted a podcast of my presentation there in May on students and open access. (Thanks to Peter for noticing it, even when the Google Alert on my name didn’t.)

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OA at ALA: How do the chapters fare?

Posted on 12 June 2008
Filed under Florida, Libraries, Open access
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A recent post on Open Access News highlighted the fact that while the American Library Association supports OA as a matter of policy, several of its journals are not themselves OA.

I remembered having been shocked that the Florida Library Association, a state ALA chapter, didn’t provide OA to its journal. So I decided to investigate a little and see how the other state and regional chapters fare.

I went through the states, starting with A and stopping at Louisiana (after which I lost interest). I also checked the regional chapters, as well as the chapters in D.C., Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

The verdict:

Of the 18 state chapters reviewed, 7 appear to provide OA to the journal they publish. (That number increases to 8 out of 19 if you include D.C., which ALA counts as a state chapter.) Methodology: I browsed the chapter’s Web site and searched Google for the journal named on ALA’s chapter list. (In a few cases, I couldn’t find the chapter’s “journal” but did find the chapter’s “newsletter” — e.g. Kentucky, Colorado, Alabama.) Louisiana is borderline, since the most recent issue online is from 2000: I’m not sure whether that’s the most recent issue published, or whether more recent issues haven’t made it online yet; I counted Louisiana as OA in my count. So that’s 42% of this (non-random) sample, or 58% if you include the newsletter-but-not-journal states.
I couldn’t find a Web site for either Guam or the Virgin Islands — neither the association nor its journal, if it publishes one. (ALA counts these as regional chapters, so I didn’t include these in the previous count.)
All four regional chapters representing the states provide OA to their journal.

It would be nice for ALA to exercise more leadership here, and lean on their chapters to provide OA to their journals (and adopt a broad commitment to OA to all their publications). (Similarly, the forward-thinking already currently providing OA could goad their hesitant peers into doing likewise.)

I’m sure it would help if ALA would provide tech support for the chapters’ publications, e.g. allow chapters to use ALA’s publishing platform, or facilitate the chapters in pooling resources to fund a system they can all use. (In almost every case for the states I reviewed, providing OA meant simply posting a PDF of the journal issue, with no HTML or Web-formatted version. This suggests the technical/administrative burden of providing OA may be an important factor, beyond any fear of lost revenue — or at least that there’s a learning curve to be overcome.)

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The brilliance of Flickr Commons and the public domain

Posted on 10 April 2008
Filed under Copyright, Libraries, Open content, Public domain
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Flickr’s The Commons is a really clever initiative.

Flickr gets high-value historical content (the kind of stuff that drives the long tail) and some nice publicity. The collections get to bring their content to many new users in a new way. Beyond access, the collections can also accrue tags, comments, and geo-tags, potentially adding a layer of valuable data. Since the photos are in the public domain (and marked as such), everyone has full re-use rights; there’s no threat of Flickr holding the collections hostage. (I don’t know whether the collections can mass-export all the associated data in a useful format, though. If not, The Commons is basically just a neat toy and not of archival value.) All around, it’s a great collaboration between for-profit and non-profit entities, where everybody wins, including the public.

The confluence of all this is maybe best demonstrated in this blog post by Australia’s Powerhouse Museum, the latest to join The Commons:

What Flickr offers the Powerhouse is an immediate large and broader audience for this content. And with this exposure we hope that we will have a strong driver to increase the cataloguing and digitisation of the remaining Tyrrell glass plate negatives as well as many more the previously hidden photographic collections of the Powerhouse.

In other words, projects like this create demand for more digitization of open content. Now that’s a comedy of the commons.

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Gov. Crist proclaims Library Appreciation Month

Posted on 27 March 2008
Filed under Florida, Libraries
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… WHEREAS, the expansion of electronic networks linking libraries and their resources gives users easier access to information; …

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Re-discovering Florida’s literary legacy — or not

Posted on 15 March 2008
Filed under Academia, Florida, Libraries, Open access, Publishing
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Out of curiosity, I went Googling for literary magazines published at my alma mater, the University of Florida. What I found:

Subtropics, published by the English department, in print since 2006. In current publication. A few items from the current issue are available online; no items from past issues are available online. The poems online are only available as an image, not as text.
Mangrove Review (no Web site; record in UF library catalog), published by the English department(?), in print since 1985(?) (since 1982 according to Worldcat). Soliciting submissions as recently as October 2007; described there as “UF’s official literary magazine.” Alternate titles: Mangrove, Mangrove Literary Review. Web site formerly at this address; see past versions in the Internet Archive. Not to be confused with the Mangrove Review published at Florida Gulf Coast University or Mangrove at the University of Miami (popular name, eh?).
Tea (no Web site; record in UF library catalog), published the English Society (student-run), in print since (when?). Soliciting submissions as recently as February 2008. Web site formerly at this address; see past versions in the Internet Archive.

As far as I can tell, none of these are available in UF’s Digital Collections; although the library does have their back issues, it hasn’t digitized them (at least not yet; probably for permissions issues or lack of resources).

So, of at least 3 literary magazines published at UF (who knows how many others there have been over the years?), none of them are available online. It’s not just that they’re not open access: you couldn’t pay for access if you wanted to. Two of the three appear not to even have Web sites.

It must be said that this is a terrible strategy for sharing the magazines’ contents with the public.

If any readers have information about these or other literary magazines, or any plans to digitize them, please add them in the comments.

Rumors of other literary magazines from UF’s past:

The Florida Pennant, published by the Dixie Literary Society beginning in 1907
The Swamp Angel, published by the Quill Club beginning in 1923
The Silver Bow, published beginning in 1925
Florida Quarterly, published 1967-1976, “Official student-edited literary magazine of the University of Florida”
Departure: GNV, published from 1989 or earlier until 2002 or 2003. Web site formerly at this address; see past versions in the Internet Archive.

In the process, I turned up all sorts of other stuff… Read more

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FSF to libraries: boycott DRM

Posted on 7 February 2008
Filed under Copyright, DRM, FOSS, Libraries
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Sometimes, different interests of mine will intersect in fascinating ways. Here’s one: the Free Software Foundation’s DefectiveByDesign.org campaign is asking libraries to boycott DRM, digital restrictions on content the library purchases or subscribes to. Specifically, DbD is targeting the Boston Public Library for its use of OverDrive’s Digital Library Reserve platform.

I would expect libraries to be receptive to the message of eliminating DRM — DRM is diametrically opposed to libraries’ missions of access and preservation, and is an awful abuse of copyright law against the public interest. But it’s hard to argue that libraries should forgo access altogether to DRM-crippled content if they can’t negotiate out of it or acquire the content from another source. (Exhibit A: The Boston library’s response.) With that said, there’s plenty of room for library pushback against DRM, which could further signal vendors that there’s no market for it. We’ll see how this turns out.

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