Musings about librarianship: 5 things I learnt about Open Access after reading Crawford's & Suber's books
abernard102@gmail.com 2013-01-20
Summary:
"As far as I remember, I have never done a book review on this blog before, so here is my review of both. But first a little context of where I am coming from. As a librarian who isn't specifically involved in my institution's Institutional Repository team or Open Access in a big way, I haven't been specifically studying Scholarly Communications, so I am not as versed in this area as I would like. For sure I am not a specialist or even activist who subscribes to Open Access newsletters and hangs out at open access related mailing lists. Though I haven't exactly stuck my head in the sand either and have read the occasional blog post or news article on open access that streams past me on Twitter or Facebook (of which the Scholarly Kitchen blog posts seem very popular) and also read discussions on the topic on Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed etc by librarians in the trenches who are promoting Open Access. However various parts of my work in 2012 including chance conversations with research staff, started me down the path of considering Open Access seriously and towards the end of 2012, I decided to prepare for 2013 by reading formally on the topic and both books which aims at quickly bringing people (Crawford's probably more for Librarians & Suber's more for researchers) up to speed with the concept of Open Access seem to be written just for people like me. Both books are short, Crawford's weighs in at 71 pages and Suber's at 241. So I was curious how much material in both were new to me. There can't be that much to know about the basic principles of Open Access that I didn't read before in some blog post or article via Twitter right? Actually I was wrong, I did learn quite a few things. As such, I thought it would be interesting to list the things I learnt from the books that were most surprising to me. It's important to note that I actually started with Crawford's book first in Oct 2012 , finished it fairly quickly in a couple of sittings in a couple of days. Then, I got Suber's book on Christmas Eve 2012 but read it in spurts before finishing it up last week. Also, I only read the main text and did not refer to the endnotes which was liberally included in Suber's book..."