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A year in Open Access advocacy: 2012 [Confessions of a Science Librarian]
While it has not generally been my practice to do year end review posts, artificially trying to tie the various and disparate strands of my blogging habits together into some sort of coherent story, I think for this year it’s worth doing. And that’s because my blogging year did seem to have a coherent theme — advocating for a fairer and more just scholarly publishing ecosystem.
In particular I spent an awful lot of time advocating for Open Access in one way, shape or form. Not that I haven’t always done so, but with all the various events happening in the academic and library worlds this year, it seemed to be a fairly consistent thread. Of course, not all the advocacy was directly for OA, some was for general reform of the scholarly communications system as a whole, redressing the imbalance between the power of publishers and libraries. Sometimes it was advocating for general fairness in the way the online world is regulated and governed.
At the end of the day — hindsight tells me that my mission for 2012 was to talk about changing the world.
Let’s see how that played out, month by month, post by post.
January
- Scholarly Societies: It’s time to abandon the AAP over The Research Works Act
- Around the Web: Some posts on The Research Works Act (Now chronological!)
- Michael Nielsen: SPARC Innovator
- SOPA: Why it’s a bad idea
February
- Around the Web: Research Works Act & Elsevier boycott
- Penguin ebooks & The Research Works Act: Publishers gain, communities lose
- Elsevier boycott: Time for librarians to rise up!
March
April
- My exciting new job at Elsevier: Inaugural editor-in-chief of The Journal of Applied Publishing Experiments
- Around the Web: Some resources on the Panton Principles & open data
- Open Data & The Panton Principles: Thoughts on a presentation to librarians
- Around the Web: Even Harvard can’t afford everything, The importance of physical campuses, DRM strategy and more
May
June
- PeerJ formally announced: Innovative new business model for open access
- Interview with Peter Binfield and Jason Hoyt of PeerJ
- Around the Web: PeerJ-orama
- Is it ok to get paid to promote Open Access?
August
- Around the Web: More on open data, textmining the literature and The Panton Principles
- An Open Access thought experiment
September
- Whither Science Publishing?
- Thought experiment or reality: Walking away from the American Chemical Society?
- Reading Diary: Open Access by Peter Suber
- The American Chemical Society: Paving paradise to put up a parking lot
October
- Around the Web: SUNY Potsdam vs. American Chemical Society in chronological order
- Around the Web: SCOAP3: Another world is possible, The price of inequality and more
- Getting Your Science Online: Presentation at Brock University Physics Department
November
- Recent Presentations: Getting Your Science Online and Evaluating Information
- Building a new scholarly communications ecosystem from first principles
December
One of the big stories of the year was certainly the proposed Research Works Act legislation in the US, a story which took on a huge life of it’s own, morphing and expanding into the related Elsevier boycott story. When I started collecting posts for those I really did not know what I was getting myself into as the searching and updating really took up the lion’s share of my blogging time in the early part of the year. Believe it or not, I have probably more than 100 posts up to June 2012 or so waiting to be added. And still related to that is the whole Open Access petition campaign which I also participated in and blogged about later on in the year.
During the summer, the PeerJ announcement was something I blogged about. And the big story from the last half of the year was the SUNY Potsdam cancelling of their ACS subscriptions because they were too expensive. That issue consumed the library blogosphere for quite a while in the fall and if the blogging traffic seems to have decreased I still don’t think we’ve heard the last of the crisis in journal subscription costs, especially as it relates to the ACS. And who knows, maybe more publishers will be drawn into that.
And as the year ends, I’m drawn back into my futurological speculations, thinking about how science publishing should evolve and related to that, still thinking and still writing about how libraries could evolve. But that’s for January, I hope.
2012-12-31 07:45:18
Source: http://scienceblogs.com/confessions/2012/12/31/a-year-in-open-access-advocacy-2012/
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