Academic Movers 2014: In-Depth with Emily Drabinski

Q: You helped move the journal Radical Teacher, where you’re a board member, to open access. Talk about why you did that and what the process helped you learn? A: Radical Teacher had never had a librarian on the board before. I think that new perspective was helpful to them, having someone who understood the economics of publishing to help them make decisions about their future and survive as a publication. It reminded me that librarians know things. We’re a fundamentally helpful and self-effacing field, and that means it can be easy to forget what we know. Radical Teacher didn’t know why they were losing institutional subscriptions. As a librarian, I knew because I had cancelled them two or three times in the course of my career at that point....