Your Librarian Wears Combat Boots! (Part 1)

"[L]ibrarians are in the trenches on the front lines in the battles for reasonable and informed copyright law. They are actually fighting on a number of fronts–in the creation of new content, in trying to make existing content available to patrons and researchers, and in preservation of copyrighted materials....One of the fronts on which librarians work is at the site of new knowledge production. Not only are they closely involved with faculty and students in the resource discovery process, but many librarians are active advocates for open publishing. As more academic journals go digital, but with prices from journal publishers going up, not down, libraries look to the open access initiative to solve both cost and permission issues. Many are involved with or support digital journals published using the Open Journal Systems (OJS) of the Public Knowledge Project (PKP)....Librarians are also involved in promoting broader academic use rights for faculty who publish. Through our library, we regularly run workshops for faculty on Creative Commons licensing....Additionally, when faculty are entering into publication contracts, where possible, our institution also tries to help them secure their own future rights to their work, and tries to preserve current and future academic access to their work for the institution...."