Tomorrow January 18, 2012, the several websites are joining the web strike against SOPA, this site included. As noted last week, the proposed legislation is a terrible idea and a death knell for net neutrality. (Obligatory LSW discussion.) We all need to speak up and not let the system grind us down. Go listen to some CRASS.
This week there’s been some interesting and disgusting things going on within scholarly publishing. Most of the internet is up at arms about SOPA, the ludicrous Stop Online Piracy Act. Earlier this week I stumbled across an interesting blog post Why The Movie Industry Can’t Innovate and the Result is SOPA. I think the same could be said for any of the content publisher – books, music, video games, not just film. Look at the list of SOPA supporters. Along with the usual suspects (major lables, the big 6, etc), you get Elsevier and Wolters Kluwer. Nice to know they’re against net neutrality. Cameron Neylon wrote an excellent post on how SOPA will affect scientific research. You need to read it. Loud library advocate Andy Woodworth is making a list to talk to vendors at ALA Midwinter next month. Good on him. I was thinking about talking to some folks at SLA later this month, but then something else caught my eye…
The Research Works Act (H.R. 3699). A post from the SPARC OA forum distils it:
“No Federal agency may adopt, implement, maintain, continue, or otherwise engage in any policy, program, or other activity that — (1) causes, permits, or authorizes network dissemination of any private-sector research work without the prior consent of the publisher of such work; or (2) requires that any actual or prospective author, or the employer of such an actual or prospective author, assent to network dissemination of a private-sector research work.”
Not surprisingly, publishers think this is a great idea.
The Research Works Act will prohibit federal agencies from unauthorized free public dissemination of journal articles that report on research which, to some degree, has been federally-funded but is produced and published by private sector publishers receiving no such funding. It would also prevent non-government authors from being required to agree to such free distribution of these works. Additionally, it would preempt federal agencies’ planned funding, development and back-office administration of their own electronic repositories for such works, which would duplicate existing copyright-protected systems and unfairly compete with established university, society and commercial publishers.
This is just bullshit. Especially in light of the publishers’ healthy profit margins often on the work of academics paid in prestige. The need to publish in these big, expensive journals for a lot of faculty is the only way they can attain tenure. The only way they can fund their work is to get federal (or other publicly funded) grants. Tax payers can pay for the research, but then they can’t see the results. It’s a great racket for the publishers. (Sounds sort of like the vicious cycle of federal student loans and the for-profit colleges, which is pretty much any university these days.)
Publishers are still upset about the NIH Public Access Policy. UC Berkeley professor Michael Eisen yesterday blogged about Elsevier paying NY Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney to promote the bill. Jason Baird Jackson from Indian University asks who else is Elsevier lobbying for this bill?
It’s outrageous that in a time when everybody’s budgets are being squeezed, the big scholarly publishers are getting more creative about making huge profit margins. If the government is going to fund research, they need to also fund the publishing because that’s the only way the public will have access to the information and data. The funding for publishing has always been an afterthought or meant to be a cost recovery tool, which explains how NTIS and the National Academies “function”.
I’ll be in DC a couple of weeks for the TRB Annual Meeting. (TRB is part of the National Academies.) It’s where the transportation research agenda is discussed, research that will be funded by the taxpayers. I’ll try to get some answers.
The Research Works Act is seriously bad news, as is SOPA. Maybe it’s because I just watched all of the Bond films, but I really hope this isn’t just general incompetence but a master plan from SPECTRE to take over the world by destroying scientific research and scholarly publishing. Blofeld, Largo, Dr. No, and their henchmen are off springing the mousetrap. We just need James Bond to stop them. Or us.
I was talking to a colleague yesterday about the new year. Consensus was that 2012 has to be better than 2011.
2011 sucked. It started ominously and ended with fatigue and weariness. It seemed like every week the situation changed. I lost my job. I got it back, sort of. Now my library’s going through a metamorphosis and we have no idea what the end result will look like.
In the much needed break, I realized I lost the spark with my job. Actually, the profession got tedious. I don’t feel any drive as a librarian. I feel doomed and run down.
That’s gotta stop.
I want to reengage, and the first step is taking time to see what’s going on. Not just scanning FriendFeed or Twitter, make an effort to learn and try a cool thing a week. Keep me honest.
Today on /. there is a story Searching for Mark Pilgrim., linking to the blog post of Eric Meyer.
Just yesterday, I took a screenshot of the title page of Dive Into HTML5 to include in a presentation as a highly recommended resource. Now it’s gone. That site, along with all the other “Dive Into…†sites (Accessibility, Python, Greasemonkey, etc.) and addictionis.org, is returning an HTTP “410 Gone†message. Mark’s Github, Google+, Reddit, and Twitter accounts have all been deleted. And attempts to email him have been bounced back.
I was using Dive Into Python to learn Python. When you go to it now, you get the picture above – gone. (Thankfully there’s already a mirrored version.)
I also wonder why Mark Pilgrim decided to wipe all of his work from the web, but also the implications of infosuicide. A lot of the information sharing on the web is done with a level of trust. I trust that you won’t just delete everything and make it all disappear. I guess it’s a matter of degrees – a one off site is fleeting. A whole brand, you think that would have some permanence.
Infosuicide worries me for the long term implications for the community. I don’t like gaps, but I also don’t think we can avoid it. The Wayback machine can work, but it’s not capturing everything. And so is the ephemeral nature of the internet….
My last post here was pretty bleak, but then again the situation for many libraries is rather bleak right now. All is not lost though. After having some meetings and discussions, I have a much rosier view. Well, not rosier, but optimistic. We need to seize these opportunities to change and grow. Silver lining and all that.
This week there was a big discussion about 8 librarian layoffs at the University of San Diego. It brought up issues about professional development, changing job descriptions, and leadership in libraries. All of these issues are at the centre of the discussion when it comes to revitalizing libraries. Barbara Fister does a good job in summing up the situation in Library Journal.
Last week, when I was getting out of my dark funk about the profession, I really started to focus on rebuilding. Not just myself and my career, but the libraries I’m involved with. Clearly what we’ve been doing is no longer working. Not to say that our services aren’t wanted or needed, but we need to reframe them to keep them relevant. Something that the San Diego situation has brought into light is the ability for so many to coast. Maybe it’s because I’m still (barely) on the low side of 30, but the thought of coasting to retirement baffles me. I understand though how people get stuck in that professional rut (especially in academia), and how expectations all around settle. Then as the mission shifts and time passes, we’re either asking to justify our relevancy or scramble to move (or both).
See, that moving, that excites me. Let’s imagine a library without a physical collection. Not really hard to imagine any more. What would you do? Would you bother cataloguing things? How would ILL work? What about circulation? Those are some of the central services libraries provide, but do we have to? Not all of us. What about the people who are responsible for them? Well, hopefully they are already thinking of the next step.
What does this have to do with Liberos? (They still exist even though catenaccio has disappeared.) On this week’s Football Ramble, they read a listener’s email about Torsten Frings (pictured above) playing as Libero for Toronto FC. Frings, who played as a midfielder for Dortmund, Werder, and Germany has changed his game to meet his team’s need. He changed and it’s working pretty well.
To succeed in the long run, many of these odd, small libraries will need to evolve into agile hybrids but I’m not sure what that will be. I don’t think anybody knows, but we have to be open to the possibility. I really think we could sort of be the bellwether for larger research libraries. More emphasis on services, collaboration, and not recreating the wheel. I don’t think all libraries will go completely virtual, but I also think innovation will come from abandoning the “protector of the physical” mentality many libraries have.
Thrilling, isn’t it?
