Peter, of course, was my editor at Open Access News, and it was an honor to work with him. You could hardly have asked for a better boss, and I learned a tremendous amount.

Before OAN, though – and since – Peter has always been there for me. He helped publicize my work for open access at the University of Florida and with Students for Free Culture, when I thought I was a lonely outpost in the hinterlands. When I was developing SPARC’s student outreach campaign, he was a tremendous resource. When I decided to try my hand at freelancing, he helped me understand what it would mean. When I started pondering going to grad school, he helped me think it through.

And I’m far from the only one. Peter is the glue that holds the open access movement together. Much more could be said about Peter’s talents and accomplishments, but that might be the most important thing to know.

I had the good fortune to be working for ALA during last year’s Patterson Award ceremony. It is, I think, a tremendously important award. Take a look at the past recipients and you’ll see what I mean. They’re the people who the future will thank.

A chained library is a library where the books are attached to their bookcase by a chain, which is sufficiently long to allow the books to be taken from their shelves and read, but not removed from the library itself. This practice was usual for reference libraries (that is, the vast majority of libraries) from the Middle Ages to approximately the 18th century, as books were extremely valuable during this period. …

What an incredible metaphor! Information (and its containers) was so scare that the architecture of libraries was literally designed around chains to secure it.

I found another interesting tidbit in the page on Carnegie libraries:

The design of the Carnegie libraries has been given credit for [...] creating an opportunity for people to discover books on their own. “The Carnegie libraries were important because they had open stacks which encouraged people to browse… People could choose for themselves what books they wanted to read,” according to Walter E. Langsam, an architectural historian and teacher at the University of Cincinnati. Before Carnegie, patrons had to ask a clerk to retrieve books from closed stacks.

In both cases, the increasing availability of books meant that the literal architecture of distribution could be changed to give the public greater freedom to use them: first the ability to take books home, later the ability to browse the stacks oneself.

I don’t have to tell anyone that computers and the Internet have catalyzed the creation of architectures that give users even greater abilities to find and use information. But that’s not the end of the trajectory toward greater access to information. Rather, some very significant advances, such as open access to scholarship, are taking place right now.

There is a tendency to look at the open access movement as only of interest to researchers and educators. Though patient advocates like Sharon Terry have been speaking out about the benefits of access to the public, skeptics continue to question the value of access to the research literature for the general public.

No doubt there were skeptics who questioned the value of letting patrons take books home from the library. Doubtless there were skeptics who questioned the value of letting patrons browse the stacks by themselves. They were wrong.

I see two lessons for libraries:

• Don’t take the trajectory for granted. Moreover, don’t assume that the current form of the library will or should remain that way in the future. Instead, look at the library as an organization whose mission is to preserve and provide access to information. Libraries, then, should always aim to speed progress along the trajectory toward greater access, and should advocate for greater access, even if it’s not directly or exclusively through the library.
• Greater access to information correlates to a decline in library control. In other words, less control makes the library more useful. In a world of information abundance (or overabundance) rather than scarcity, libraries have a crucial role in helping users find, evaluate, and make meaningful use of information resources, even if they can access them outside of the library.

Academic and research libraries, then, shouldn’t be alone in advocating for open access. There is a need for greater engagement from other types of libraries, and I think we’ll increasingly see this. (That’s not to say other libraries haven’t been supporters of open access, but it’s largely been academic and research libraries at the forefront.)

In addition to public libraries, it seems sensible for medical and law librarians to take an even more active role in supporting open access. Both law and medical libraries serve practitioners who aren’t researchers but nonetheless could benefit from greater access to the latest scholarship, to apply it in their practice. In addition, medical and law libraries also serve members of the public who need access to this specialized literature: the Medical Library Association has a Consumer and Patient Health Information Section and the American Association of Law Libraries has a Legal Information Services to the Public section.

I can easily imagine the day (if they don’t already) when libraries host information sessions for the general public on locating, evaluating, and using scholarly resources, many or all of which will be open access — the same way they do now for patrons interested in genealogy or business. (Such sessions won’t substitute for a college education, but may complement or refresh it.)

In retrospect, we may find opening access to scholarship to be as empowering to the public as taking the chains off of books.

The Law Library of Congress began harvesting legal blawgs in 2007. The collection has grown to more than one hundred items covering a broad cross section of legal topics.

Questions:

• What are the criteria for inclusion here? (It’s apparently curated, not an opt-in service like I suggested previously. Note that the two strategies are not incompatible.)
• The archived pages are openly accessible (just like pages in the Internet Archive). This is contrary to concerns which some had raised about copyright in either the blog or third-party content (like blog designs). Is there a special exemption for LOC? Or are they relying on the same argument as the Internet Archive (or Google’s cache, for that matter)? (P.S. Is the Internet Archive’s argument fair use or a specific statutory exemption? What about Google?)
• Did LOC ask the authors of these blogs for permission before archiving them, or do they consider it part of their general duty to collect and preserve? (For that matter, do the authors of these blogs even know they’re being archived by LOC?) Does it matter, either as a matter of etiquette or of law?
• The archiving frequency for all the blogs seems to be monthly. Should it be more often, less often, dependent on the blog (some are updated more frequently than others) …?
• Are other branches of LOC harvesting blogs in those subject areas, too? Are other national libraries doing this?
• What’s the history of the program? What’s the case they make for doing this? What’s it cost?

I don’t do much with preservation, so I plead ignorance. Is anybody preserving scholarly blogs (or other “grey” online scholarly resources), other than general-purpose national archiving and the Internet Archive? (Is it en vogue to do Web archiving for certain domains/types of contents vs. general purpose?)

Also, a suggestion: What about an opt-in archiving service for scholarly blogs? (Not opt-in for an individual page, as with WebCite, but for an individual blog/site, to be harvested on a recurring basis.) I don’t suggest it as the end of a solution, but as the beginning of one. An interested library or archive (or consortium) could, I assume, provide such a service fairly cheaply (e.g., someone could build the service in their basement over a weekend). The opt-in could be a simple Web form, asking for the URL of the site and some metadata, maybe also getting a license to provide open access to the preserved copies if the original goes dark. (P.S. Preservation/copyright experts: Is such a license needed?) This might provide a higher level of service than general-purpose Web archiving, e.g. the ability to categorize sites by scientific domain or topic, more frequent/robust archiving than is accorded to pictures of cats with captions, etc.

I imagine I’m glossing over an entire body of literature on the topic. Hopefully someone will let me know where I’m wrong!

The initial idea was brilliant in its simplicity: get bloggers around the world to write about a female role model in technology. The pledge attracted 1,700 signatures, and more than 500 published posts have been recorded so far.

I’ve had the pleasure to meet and work with a number of outstanding women in technology and information policy, including the young women of Students for Free Culture (such as Elizabeth Stark and Karen Rustad); Laurie Taylor, now acting director of the University of Florida’s Digital Library Center; the remarkable women of SPARC, Heather Joseph and Jennifer McLennan; many others throughout the world of libraries and open access, including Prue Adler, Julia Blixrud, and Karla Hahn of ARL, Donna Okubo of PLoS, Heather Morrison, and others; Heather Ford, formerly of iCommons; and many others. Wendy Seltzer‘s Chilling Effects Clearinghouse inspired me as a tool against Internet censorship and repression. Jessica Litman’s Digital Copyright was a constant companion when I studied the DMCA as an undergrad. I even read danah boyd‘s and Dorothea Salo‘s blogs.

But when I thought of someone to profile, one women stood out in my mind: Gigi Sohn. I think it’d be realistic to call Gigi one of the most important women in American tech policy. Gigi and Public Knowledge have been instrumental in many of the most important legal and political battles of the era, from the successful suit to overturn the broadcast flag to orphan works, Net neutrality, and more. Her hard-nosed approach gets results even as it wins admirers.

So, cheers to Gigi, and to the past, present, and future women of tech. Happy Ada Lovelace Day!

I wasn’t able to be as involved with OA Day as I would have liked, due to a variety of personal matters, but I still think of it as (in some part) my baby. I was one of the leaders of 2007′s National Day of Action for Open Access and one of the leaders in refining that event into OA Day. We’ve come a long way in the year and a half separating those milestones, and the remarkable growth of OA Day reflects that progress.

The Day of Action was conceived as being student-led and student-oriented; by contrast, OA Day was by all, for all. OA Day was also international, rather than solely U.S.-focused, in scope. OA Day had more support from SPARC and PLoS, whose great efforts and prestige in the community vastly raised the profile of the event and contributed significantly to its growth. Notably, libraries were much more active in organizing activities to promote OA, which I see in part as a reflection of the increased resources available for (and acceptance of) library outreach, especially to students.

I’ve spent much of yesterday and today poring through the many blog posts marking OA Day. They were written by researchers, students, librarians, publishers, technologists, and advocates. They range from cursory to extensive; from scientific in tone to personal and emotionally moving; and they espouse the broad litany of arguments in favor of OA. In a word, the response has been simply inspirational. Thank you. To everyone who hosted an event for OA Day, or attended one, or wrote a blog post about it, or shared the word with a colleague or friend, and to the institutions that timed the announcement of a new initiative or product to coincide with OA Day: thank you.

A hearty kudos go to my colleagues at SPARC and PLoS whose sweat equity and financial commitment made this possible. (Thanks, then, also go to their funders and supporters. For the many blog posts which have remarked on the need for greater advocacy, few have discussed how to make this possible; as with all things, it takes resources. Considering the mighty juggernaut that is the OA movement, if people saw the shoestrings earmarked for advocacy, it’d make heads spin.) Special recognition also goes to the speakers and moderators on the Webcasts, as well as the filmmakers and interviewees of the Voices of Open Access series.

I offer this personal pledge: as long as I’m able to continue working within the OA movement, I promise to rededicate myself to leveraging and building upon the momentum of OA Day — to spread the word wider; to deepen commitments; to motivate us anew to speak up, to act up, and to live out our principles; to ensure the urgent message of OA echoes in the halls of power and in the hearts of scholars, today’s and tomorrow’s — and, if we are very lucky, to make Open Access Day 2009 even bigger and better than the first one.

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:

1. I didn’t know Haworth published OA journals (and the announcement didn’t refer to the journal as OA)
2. 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!

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.)

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.