Dorothea Salo, and I’m a librarian working as an instructor at the Information School at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Thank you so much for inviting me to share Open Access Week with you! It’s just about my favorite week of the year. I’m right in the middle of the festivities here at NIU this week, which is an interesting place to be. I’m guessing we have people here from all across the continuum of knowledge and belief about open access -- that’s usually what happens at these things. So what I want to do here is pull together what you may have already heard, and what you’ll hear the rest of this week, into a framework, a coherent way of thinking about what open access is FOR and why we want it. Because it’s easy with these things to get trapped in the policy-and-legislation realm -- I’m guessing that the Biss bill -- law, now -- is causing a lot of discussion and a lot of headaches and a lot of worry, and just for an hour here I want to step back from that, okay? I want to step back from that, give a little bit of a thirty-thousand-foot view. With luck, that will make the discussions that you have to have -- and you DO have to have them, there’s no way around them, it’s just how these things work -- with luck, I’m going to make those discussions easier, and less acrimonious, and I hope they’ll even be more inspiring and more fun! Finally, I want to goose you into action. I know, I know, it feels like there’s enough going on, right? But we don’t have to wait for the discussions and policymaking to end before we take open-access action. We can do things now! So there will be homework! Don’t worry, it won’t be MUCH homework.
access to the research literature is really simple. We -- we researchers, we educators, we students, we librarians, we EVERYBODY -- want more win and less fail. I mean, how much simpler could it get, right? Wait, wait, wait, what do I mean by win and fail?
a journal article on the web that looks interesting, you download it or just read it right on the page, end of story. It should be that simple! Right?! Because who needs the hassle of anything else.
bucks to get past the paywall, buster. This one actually hit me personally -- I wanted to read this article because it’s dead on point for a course I teach, BUT... our library doesn’t subscribe to this journal. I didn’t want to read this article so badly that I was going to pay thirty bucks for it, so I just didn’t read it. The paywall worked. And that’s at least three kinds of fail. It’s a fail for me, obviously, because I didn’t get to read something that might be useful. Assuming the article’s any good -- and I’m totally willing to believe it is -- it’s a fail for my students, too, because they don’t get to read it either. But there’s a third kind of fail that doesn’t often get mentioned, so I’m going to mention it. This? Is also a fail from the authors’ point of view. They didn’t write this for me to NOT READ IT! And they don’t get anything out of keeping it away from me! The authors are certainly not seeing any of that thirty bucks! They want to be paid in REUSE and CREDIT, and because I can’t actually read this, I can’t reuse it, and I won’t have any reason to credit or cite the authors, right? So the authors lose too. And you know, every time the normal cycles of teaching and research and learning get disrupted like this, it makes me sad. And angry. Maybe you too? This isn’t how it’s supposed to be!
stands for “too long, didn’t read.” I’ve seen a couple of knockoffs of that acronym calling out paywalls. This one stands for “behind paywall; didn’t read.”
a thing, and in my book it’s just more evidence of how broken everything is. However you want to abbreviate or hashtag it, this is fail. Nobody wins when people who care about our research get turned away by a paywall! And this happens all the time. It happens to us. It happens to our students. It happens to K-12 educators and THEIR students. It happens to practitioners out in the world trying to apply research to real problems, it happens to policymakers, citizen scientists, grant agencies and grant reviewers, journalists… all kinds of people with all kinds of legitimate interest in reading research! And it’s just fail. It shouldn’t happen.
paywalls is through libraries, right? Libraries pay for access, everybody gets access, everybody LOVES the librarians who make it possible, everybody wins. Really? Everybody wins? Does everybody in this room feel like they’re a winner under this system? ‘Cos yeah, seriously, I’m a librarian and I don’t feel like I’m winning!
everybody is not winning. Leaving aside for just a moment that “everybody” does not have access to an academic library, and that’s a real problem, even those who CAN get into an academic library -- even a ginormous library system like the one where I work -- even we don’t have access to everything we need. Am I right? So “library as access solution” is fail. Speaking as an actual librarian here, it’s just not working, and it’s not going to start working again any time soon, sorry. And it’s not that we librarians aren’t trying, we TOTALLY are, it’s that the whole game is rigged against us, and we NEED help and support to fix it. We cannot win, not the way we’re going. We HAVE to change the game.
we’re up against. The dotted line is inflation across the broad economy. The SOLID line is what libraries are spending on journals and journal databases. Just journals, no books. There should be a third line about library budgets, but there isn’t, so I’ll just say, they’re flat as a pancake most places, and even where they’re rising, they’re not rising as fast as regular inflation, never mind actual journal-price inflation. So libraries are losing purchasing power by leaps and bounds, and all the money in the WORLD wouldn’t actually catch us up. At the same time, the scholarly literature is only getting bigger! And explaining what-all happened here would take me more time than I have today, so I won’t -- trust me, I could go on for hours, I teach a summer course where I actually do! I WILL say that there’s fault on all sides. Librarians signed on to deals that were only ever going to blow up in everybody’s face, faculty steadfastly refused to pay attention to what was going on except to blame librarians, administrators wrongly thought that just giving libraries more money would solve the paywall problem, publishers have been playing some seriously ugly and cynical games, it’s just fail all around. And here’s the kicker. No, really, this is unbelievable but it’s true. The money already in the system is PLENTY enough to do the actual work of publishing the literature. That money is just disappearing into the wrong pockets, not to mention being misspent to prop up paywalls.
academe that reward the wrong things. They don’t reward openness, and they don’t reward evidence that people actually read your specific stuff. They reward publishing in journals with high impact factors, and there are a MILLION reasons this is total fail, but one of them is -- high impact-factor journals tend to be paywalled. That’s changing, thank goodness, but academe still needs to own its co- dependence with impact factor, because it’s stupidly destroying promising careers AND feeding the paywall fail.
so-called “altmetrics” movement, which is expanding our understanding of scholarly impact beyond journal impact factor. Here’s an example, from one of my own articles published a couple of years ago in an open-access journal, and just as a disclaimer I’m now on this journal’s editorial board. You can’t read the text I’ve circled here, it’s too small, so I’ll just tell you, this article went WILD on Twitter. Two hundred fifty-three tweets. Who saw them? Well, just adding up the number of followers on the tweeting accounts, you get over three hundred twelve thousand followers. Now, of course the real number isn’t anywhere near that high because of Twitter follower overlap. And of course not everybody who sees the tweet is going to click through and read the article. But stick with me for a thought experiment here: If ONE TENTH OF ONE PERCENT of that upper bound, that three hundred thousand tweeters, found the article this way and actually read it, that’s over three hundred readers! Let’s get wild here, if it’s one whole entire percent? That’s three THOUSAND readers. Think this kind of math could make a difference to a tenure and promotion committee? I think it might. I surely think it ought to. But you know, the numbers are kind of a sideline. What makes ME happy about this is that I know FOR CERTAIN that anybody who saw a tweet about my article and was curious enough to click through could immediately download and read it. No paywalls, no nonsense, nothing in the way, exactly as it should be. Now me, I’m lucky enough not to be tenure-track, so I have the luxury of being in the publishing game purely to make a difference. Open access helps me do that, it is a win for me. Paywalls would just get in my way.
topic, does anyone recognize this young man? (relied on OA articles in biomed to design a new cancer test) Now, here’s the thing. Do you know who the next Jack Andraka is, in your discipline? Because it’s an educator’s dream, right? Finding and influencing a brilliant new talent. Do you know where the next Jack Andraka goes to school, what journals the next Jack Andraka’s school library has access to? (Right, I know, “basically none.”) Do you know what COUNTRY the next Jack Andraka will come from? Because odds are good it won’t even be the US! Yeah, no, I don’t know who or where the next Jack Andraka is either. So in a very real way, we don’t get more Jack Andraka-style wins until there’s a LOT more open access. I think we want those wins, I really do.
Jan 11, 2013)” http://www.flickr.com/photos/ifl/7250136384/ CC-BY Anyone recognize THIS young man? Now, I don’t want to say that lack of open access is solely or uniquely at fault for what happened to Aaron Swartz. That would be ludicrously overstating the case. The social and technical and legal structures we’ve built up around paywalls DID contribute, however, and all of us in academe NEED to own that part of the fail.
of fail is still happening, now, today -- does anyone recognize THIS man? Now, Colombian copyright law is out of control, it’s even worse than ours, which is bad enough. But even beyond that, Diego Gómez would not even be in trouble in a world of open access! He wouldn’t have to post a PDF of a thesis that wasn’t his, he could just link to it! And again, isn’t it SUPPOSED to be that easy to acknowledge and credit our good influences?
open access is so great why don’t we have it already? There’s been a LOT of ink and pixels spilled on that question. I won’t bore you with it all. In my head, though...
want to see more win and less fail. Students. Teachers. Researchers. Librarians. Policymakers and lawmakers. Research funders. Even some publishers, though not all. But no stakeholder can do it all alone. Just too many moving parts and way too much inertia in this system for that! So it’s really easy for everybody to just sit back and say, hey, more win and less fail would be great, but there’s nothing I can do myself that’s gonna make a difference, so... let somebody else do something. And so -- I won’t say nobody does anything, because we wouldn’t even BE here today if a lot of people weren’t doing a lot of things, but -- a lot of people do nothing, so nobody can actually do enough.
for this anyway? Oh, just give the library more money so they’ll shut up. But tenure! But promotion! Well, my work isn’t really ready yet... But that’s work, and I’m too busy. I don’t know what a repository is, but I’m pretty sure we don’t have one. I heard it’s all a scam. I have all the access I need! Screw you, I got mine! What it amounts to is, there are a million excuses in the naked academy for not pursuing open access, and I HAVE HEARD THEM ALL. You cannot surprise me. I’ve been doing this for a decade. But there’s one excuse I want to call out specifically, because I just find it so upsetting: *CLICK* Well, I have all the access I need, what’s your problem? I’m guessing maybe this isn’t so common in this room, which is great, but PLEASE, when you hear this push back on it! Because what it really translates to, at least in my head, is *CLICK* Screw you, I got mine! And maybe that’s how you feel. Maybe you are totally willing to say “screw you, I got mine” to me when I can’t get to an article I want to read and maybe use in my teaching. Maybe you’re okay saying that to Jack Andraka, or Diego Gomez! But I’m not. And I don’t think anybody in the academy should be. That is NOT what we are about here, especially this week.
achieve more win and less fail? How do we push past the collective action problem? Well, that’s what Open Access Week is about, really. There’s lots of ways to do this! You can create win as an author, as an editor or reviewer, as a good departmental citizen or a good university citizen, or as a good citizen generally out there in the world of politics and advocacy. I’m going to make a couple-three specific suggestions, but you don’t have to follow them, they’re just ideas! Got a better way? Go for it! No matter what anybody tells you, there’s no wrong way to be open. Open is win, however you get there.
do this alone. Nobody should have to try. No matter where you are or what you do at NIU, there’s something you can do. At base, there’s this: you can learn and you can teach. Because the collective action problem is real. Nobody can flip the switch to open alone; if it was THAT easy we’d have done it already. So make sure nobody’s alone! Let’s do this together.
start from, open access to the journal literature! Maybe you’re about open licensing, making sure the scary wing of the copyright-holder party doesn’t take over the entire cultural and scholarly universe. If that’s you (*PUT ON HAT*) I am with you! We need this kind of legal infrastructure to make open access work.
won’t lie, open access to books is a long way behind journal articles because the economic structures are different and so the solutions have to be too to some extent, but it’s starting to happen, we’re starting to figure out how to pay for it, and you can be part of that! And I hope you’ll consider it.
are totally friends, you and I! This is the Open Textbook Library from Minnesota, and they’re looking for textbook reviewers from all over, so pitch in! And if an open textbook can work for you, please adopt one; this is a great place to start looking.
you’re interested in opening up the amazing wealth of unique material in local collections through digitization and open metadata. Great! I am with you! Let me put on my Digital Public Library of America pin here (*PUT ON PIN*) oh and by the way if you’re curious about DPLA, I’m a DPLA Community Rep, so ask me anything about it after we’re done here. I think this opportunity is amazing, and I’m so pleased that so many libraries and archives and museums and personal collectors are getting involved! So there’s lots of ways to open up more wins! Please learn about them, this week and beyond. I think you’ll find a niche you’ll like! For now, though, coming back to the scholarly-journal literature...
Programming code. As an author... By the end of this week, open up ONE THING. If you make academic things? I’m asking you to make ONE of those things open this week. Just one. If you can do that with a journal article you’ve written, great! Legally, please -- if you need help figuring out where you’re at with copyright, the librarians here can help you. But look, it doesn’t have to be a journal article, it can be ANYTHING academic you’ve made and hold rights to that would help other people. And normally I’d tell you I will pledge this alongside you, but I have a leetle bit of a problem there, namely that everything I’ve ever published is already open, one way or another, and a whole lot of other stuff I’ve done besides. I’m curious, can anybody else here say that? (Yes: Well, come here, I want to shake your hand! No: Okay, then there’s plenty to do, yeah?) Come join me in making work open. I’ve done some regrettable things during my career, as ya do -- but there’s one thing I have never regretted for an instant, and that’s making my work open. It has opened so many doors, created so many opportunities for me, introduced me to so many amazing people, some of whom have said to me, “I only got to read your article because it was open access, and it really helped me, so thank you.” What’s to regret about that, right? So join me. Let open work for you too.
stay there, okay? Not just any old web server, anything can happen to them and usually does, but someplace that somebody beyond you has a commitment to and is gonna take serious care of. WIN becomes FAIL when things 404, and we’re all gonna retire someday, right? Here is your library’s commitment to making your work open for the long haul. This is Huskie Commons, and it’s run by Stacey Erdman, and the reason I’m here is that Stacey is, like me, a graduate of the UW-Madison iSchool where I teach, and she invited me -- and I love it when iSchool graduates are making things happen and I’m happy to help with that! Can I get a round of applause for Stacey? Thank you. So I’m asking you to join Stacey and the NIU Libraries in their commitment to making win out of your work. To that end, here’s another goal for you: by the end of this week, I want everybody in this room, every single one of you, to add your one thing, whatever it is, to Huskie Commons. The URL’s right there, talk to Stacey and she’ll help you. And one more thing -- I’d like each of you to sign up ONE OTHER PERSON at NIU. Just one. And get them to put one piece of work in. Just one! Because each one teaching one, THAT is how we get past the collective action problem.
is FAIL. As a department... Fix tenure and promotion practices. And humanities folks, if you’re still so fixated on print books that you can’t even imagine worthwhile scholarship in any other form, I don’t even know what to say to you except STOP THAT, it’s twenty-fourteen, come on! The MLA has guidelines for you; it’s time to implement them.
when no one wanting to read NIU research is turned away by a paywall. As an INSTITUTION, it’s NIU’s job to dream big, set the big goals. Here’s the one I’d suggest, just for starters… Then figure out how to get there! And look, this goes beyond the Biss bill, okay? I know it’s tempting to just be reactive, or even to resent all this because you don’t want it imposed on you. I’m asking you to be bigger people and a better university than that. OWN open access. Own it yourselves, as an institution. Adopt this goal, or one like it, and OWN it, and make it happen. And yeah, that’ll take a lot of talking and a lot of work, that’s just life in the academy, but others have walked this road before you, and plenty of them are HAPPY to walk alongside you, because we all win with fewer paywalls.
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