The Way We Publish Now | Library Babel Fish

A lot of academics can ignore barriers caused by funding because it’s a library problem that doesn’t affect them. Inconvenience, however, does. They want their stuff easily shared, though that desire doesn’t always include willingness to do the extra work to make a toll-gated article available online; the fact that a full quarter of faculty at the University of California system have done this extra work suggests things may be changing, though only with a lot of advocacy. As the Library Loon explains, institutional repositories aren’t the magical answer to paywalls, but 25 percent participation among a very large number of scholars ain’t bad. Still, scholars like to refer people to texts, and as more and more can be shared quickly with a link, irritation will grow with those that aren’t similarly shareable.