Joining the Movement: A Call to Action | Peer to Peer Review

... “The fact that one giant publishing conglomerate after another has basically said that, in a digital age, public libraries are a bad idea has given the industry a bit of a PR problem. Until recently, the public mostly blamed their local public library when ebooks weren’t available...They are now becoming aware that publishers actually want a system that cuts public libraries out completely... Publishers can waffle all they want about the virtues of friction and developing alternatives that protect their business model; in reality, they are saying to the public, ‘Unless you are prepared to become our customer, we don’t want you touching our books... Culture is our intellectual property now, and we will set the terms for who gets access to it...’ Publishers know that the majority of scholars who give them content, review it, and provide editorial work for free don’t care how much the finished product costs... This has been a ‘library problem’ for most scholars, and what libraries have done to solve the problem has in many ways made it worse... But big publishers of all kinds have been pushing their luck... surprised by scholars’ outrage over the audacity of the Research Works Act... publishers claimed to play such a significant role that they believe published research truly is their work. That was like poking sleeping scholars with a sharpened stick... All of this leads me to wonder why on earth librarians continue to perpetuate the very system that we have been scolding scholars about for years. Many of our scholarly journals are published by the very corporations that supported the Research Works Act... which means making research in librarianship unavailable to many... To preach open access without practicing it is baffling to me. I’ve already signed the Elsevier boycott—not a tough choice, as I have not even considered publishing in one of their journals for years. I have also decided that I won’t sign a contract in the future with any book publisher that withholds ebooks from public libraries... I challenge academic librarians to be as brave as the principled academics who are willing to make a sacrifice for the greater good by signing the Elsevier boycott. This would mean not writing, reviewing, or providing editorial services for some pretty significant journals in our field, including the following...”