Consortial institutional repositories and the bystander effect – Gavia Libraria

"The Loon respects Kevin Smith. She read his scholarly-communication blog at Duke religiously, and was nothing but pleased when he succeeded to the top leadership post at Kansas libraries.

Therefore, she winced all the harder to read his encomium to consortial action on open access. The Loon is sorrier than she can fitly express to say this, but that post is more wrong than it is right.

Before she dives in, allow her to lay out her qualifications to opine: she helped launch one consortial IR and ran a different consortial IR for several years. In so doing, she of course kept her beady red eye on similar efforts (which are few, and for good reason), and on the library literature (which does not discourse of consortial IRs or any other consortial open-access initiatives much, and perhaps Smith might have wondered a bit more about that?).

Smith’s first lacuna, however, has nothing to do with IRs, instead touching on article-processing charges:

[Guédon] notes, and although it is an obvious point it still struck me when I read it clearly articulated, that APCs developed as a way for commercial publishers to exploit the movement toward OA for their own profit.

No. Well, yes and no. Yes, any flow of money toward big-pig publishers is profit-driven. But no, APCs did not spring full-armed from the head of Jove because of the open-access movement. That rewrite of history distorts gold OA’s genuine public-relations problems. APCs happened largely because they were familiar to a wide swathe of authors in the hard sciences who had been paying publishers page charges, (color) art charges, author-alt charges, and so on and so forth for ages. It is not coincidence that outside the Global South—and the Loon knows both Guédon and Smith know this; why their knowledge did not kick in here she cannot fathom—APCs caught on near-exclusively in fields where author-facing charges were already normalized. Is the Loon the only bird who remembers APC-based open-access science journals boasting that their APCs were in fact less than many toll-access journals’ page charges?"