What you can and can’t ask librarians

“‘Let’s ask our librarians to drop Elsevier subscriptions!’ some of the new-breed boycotters have eagerly suggested. Well, by all means try, but the Loon knows what the answer will be. Namely, ‘no.’ Possibly with added eyeroll and an ‘are you a complete loon?’ expression. Here’s why. Elsevier doesn’t sell individual journal subscriptions to libraries these days, except when forced to—and forcing them to is so Sisyphean that only a bare few libraries have tried, as yet... Elsevier sells multi-journal packages, and like coffee drinks at Starbuck’s, they come in large, immense, and ginormous sizes, all overpriced. Nor are they mix-and-match; libraries can’t substitute journals they want for journals they don’t. It’s pure take-it-or-leave-it. (Economists consider this a sneaky way of force-selling crappy journals that would never make it in a sole-subscription world. The Loon believes the economists quite right.) So when you tell a librarian ‘stop subscribing to Elsevier journals!’ you are thinking a dozen or so journals in your field, while the librarian has no choice but to think about several hundred journals running the entire gamut of disciplines. There’s a word for what would happen to that librarian if he acceded to your request, without the full knowledge and consent of the rest of the institution. That word is ‘fired...’ librarians have been trained not to consider the ethics of information production in their journal purchases. Library schools discuss instead gauges of usage, disciplinary accreditation, search-site usability, accessibility (sometimes; not often enough, in the Loon’s opinion), and the same hollow bibliometric measures that faculty wrongly rely upon. Who else trained librarians to act this way? Faculty, of course, considering librarians little more than walking wallets... So. What can eager-beaver boycotters reasonably ask their libraries? The Loon has a few suggestions: [1] ‘What’s the deal we have with Elsevier just now? What’s it cost? When’s it coming up for renewal?’ The more you know… [2] ‘Do we have an open-access author-fee fund?’ Self-explanatory. [3] ‘Are we members of open-access publishing houses such as PLoS and Hindawi?’ These memberships (which provide blanket discounts on author fees to institutional authors) are easy targets in library cost-cutting times. The best way to keep them alive is to ask about them and use them. [4] ‘Are we members of arXiv?’ for those in the appropriate disciplines. [5] ‘Are we working on a Harvard-style open-access mandate?’ Whatever the answer is, ask how to help move one forward. [6] ‘What are we doing for Open Access Week this year?’ [7] ‘Would you come talk to my classes about the ethics of information?’ The bare fact is that most academic libraries are doing as little as possible to hasten the coming of open access, just barely enough to save face among their library peers. They do this in large part because they know full well faculty don’t care, while faculty do care loudly and profanely about toll journals. The Loon is forced to confess shamefacedly, also, that some part of library apathy is owed to bloodyminded conservatism, another part to utter ignorance. (That last portion is especially shameful, but the Loon has found herself helpless faced by librarians who will not learn and will not think.) (This is not necessarily true of individual librarians, mind. Some libraries have one abused, stifled soul whose job this nominally is. Others have a soul somewhere who cares about this despite it not being her job. Find that soul, if she exists, and do what you can to help her. Her library, the Loon guarantees, hasn’t been.)”