A year in Open Access advocacy: 2012 – Confessions of a Science Librarian

"While it has not generally been my practice to do year end review posts, artificially trying to tie the various and disparate strands of my blogging habits together into some sort of coherent story, I think for this year it’s worth doing. And that’s because my blogging year did seem to have a coherent theme — advocating for a fairer and more just scholarly publishing ecosystem. In particular I spent an awful lot of time advocating for Open Access in one way, shape or form. Not that I haven’t always done so, but with all the various events happening in the academic and library worlds this year, it seemed to be a fairly consistent thread. Of course, not all the advocacy was directly for OA, some was for general reform of the scholarly communications system as a whole, redressing the imbalance between the power of publishers and libraries. Sometimes it was advocating for general fairness in the way the online world is regulated and governed. At the end of the day — hindsight tells me that my mission for 2012 was to talk about changing the world. Let’s see how that played out, month by month, post by post..."