Opening up knowledge on the tenure track | Information Wants To Be Free

"I’m not a hero. I’m not an open access warrior. I’m not one of those people who would risk their career on the cross of Open Access. I’m not a badass who makes demands of publishers. I ask nicely. I’m on the tenure track and the idea of walking away from an opportunity to publish is terrifying. But, you know what? You can find all of my writing (other than what’s on this blog) in PDXScholar, our institutional repository (IR). Want to read my peer-reviewed articles? My American Libraries columns from the past few years? The book chapters I’ve written since 2008? They’re all in there. My most recently article, co-authored with Lisa Hinchliffe and applying a management model to building a culture of assessment where librarians have faculty status, is in an open access journal. And I honestly didn’t think this was particularly notable these days until I read Barbara Fister’s not-at-all-cranky column in Library Journal on making our work freely available and post on Library Babelfish on tenure and the common good. Apparently a bunch of people told Barbara on Twitter that it’s because of tenure that people aren’t making their stuff open or aren’t fighting for it. I’ll tell you something: what I did was by no means a Herculean task. In most cases, I was allowed via the standard contract to publish my work in my institutional repository. In some cases, I had to use my own ugly copy, but in others, I could use the one from the publisher. In the case of one book chapter, I had to ask for a different contract, but I got it. And the contract they gave me actually allowed me to do whatever I wanted with the chapter (publish in an IR or on my blog, put it on a billboard, etc.). But when I asked the publisher for a digital copy to put in my IR, they told me there was an embargo until I showed them my contract (which they had drafted) which showed no such thing. They then asked me a bunch of questions that made it seem like they didn’t have a clue what IRs actually are. When I realized this, it made me wonder how many authors had ever pushed back (and by pushed back, I mean asked). Some of my co-authors in that book are impressive people and I’m surprised they didn’t try to get the same deal. Yes, I’ve heard horror stories about dealing with publishers and I totally agree that keeping one’s job is more important than making one article or chapter open. But there are also a lot of fish in the sea, and the number of publishers that don’t allow you to put a pre-print or post-print in an IR (sometimes with an embargo) seems to be dwindling. (Those of you who have a list of acceptable journals that you can publish in to achieve tenure, how many of them don’t allow the deposit of some product in an IR?) Even Elsevier does! And while book chapters are another kettle of fish (I seem to have a lot of fish metaphors going on in this paragraph) there are publishers who will allow you to put a copy of your work in a repository. For me, at least, it’s not necessarily about publishing in OA journals, but about making your scholarship more widely available ..."