Full Bleed: Libraries and Publishing | Peer to Peer Review

"I was pleased and excited to be invited to participate in a fascinating workshop on library publishing services last week....I heard about a wide range of library publishing initiatives, including ways libraries are using Open Journal Systems to create and manage open access journals, collaborations between university presses and libraries on projects (including the way a library helped a university press land a hot book by offering to have the library provide a support for a digital exhibit of related sources)....But I ended the first long day of sessions feeling depressed. Libraries were working so hard at creating new venues for open access publishing, but it seemed as if all that effort was just adding new publishing outlets to an already bloated publishing system, that it was impossible to slow the march of the commercial publishers that consume more and more of our budgets. As impressive as the home-grown local solutions are, they just don't have the juice to compete with multinational corporations (or with the giant scholarly societies that earn revenue from their publishing divisions in the tens of millions of dollars annually). No matter how technically skilled we are, the Nature Group and Elsevier will beat us hollow when it comes to bells and whistles. And even when publishers present us with user interfaces we hate nearly as much as the licenses, what choice do we have? They own the intellectual property our users need. And they have virtually cornered the market on prestige. So what's a librarian to do? Right now, I see four options: ..."