Not just an Academic question: Why Open Access matters for public libraries

I’ve been thinking about writing a post on Open Access for a while. The recent tragic death of Aaron Swartz seems like an appropriate time to do so.

I didn’t know a lot about Aaron Swartz before his death. I’d read about him ‘stealing’ millions of JSTOR articles, but hadn’t remembered his name. Now that I’ve read more about him, one thing has become clear: whilst Aaron Swartz will be remembered as a hacker, he should be considered a librarian hero.

Swartz was one of the developers of RSS when he was only 14 years old. He was on the original team that developed the Creative Commons system, and helped develop the Open Library project. In his 26 years he probably did more to help the spread of information than any librarian alive.

The Open Access culture that Swartz championed can all too easily be seen by public librarians as something that doesn’t concern them. Academic journals? That’s for academic libraries, right? Wrong. Every public library I know of is paying for access to some kind of academic journal content. Every public library I know of wants more access to that content. We serve a wide variety of members with a diverse range of needs. Many of them are independent adult learners, who desire access to scientific or other journal articles for any number of reasons. Why should they not have access to them?

For the uninitiated, check out this quick synopsis of how academic publishing works. In essence, publicly funded universities pay academics to perform research and write up the results, then give the resulting research papers to publishers for no charge, and then pay them to access it again. How such an insane system even came to exist remains an intriguing mystery to me.

Decisions

Open Access matters because it frees up the spread of ideas and knowledge. When a person looking for answers can’t access the information they need because they don’t have a university student card, don’t work in a university and don’t have thousands of dollars to spend, humanity is poorer for it. Public libraries paying for access to publishers and aggregators like EBSCO, Proquest and Elsevier might seem like a reasonable solution - after all, if public libraries pay on behalf of their communities, where’s the problem? The problem is staring you in the face - what happens when your library can’t afford to pay? Do you really believe in the free flow of information? Do you really believe that everyone deserves access to the world’s knowledge? Or is that only for people who live in the right suburb, in the right state, or in the right country? When you decide that it is acceptable that libraries have to pay for access to academic papers, you are deciding that some people simply don’t deserve access. You are deciding to do this to your members:

I am really getting annoyed how hard it is to follow references in papers as a person without access to a university library. Frustrating. — Rachael Ludwick (@r343l) June 17, 2012

This problem is so well recognised in academic library circles it has a name - the “Serials Crisis”. Yet public librarians don’t seem to have grasped the gravity of the problem for the wider community. Librarians are fond of defiantly declaring that there is far more information out there than just what you can find on Google. Access to paid journal databases is often touted as one of the great services libraries provide. Is this really the best we can do? We’re relevant because we spend your taxes to give you access (some) scientific papers your taxes paid for in the first place?

Costs

Everything you spend money on has two costs - the cost in hard currency, and the opportunity cost. Every dollar you give to an academic publisher or aggregation company is a dollar you can’t spend on something else. So when you pay to give your community access to something that they already paid for to be created, they’re being screwed three times.

When Aaron Swartz set up a server at MIT and downloaded 4 million articles from JSTOR he was accused of theft and threatened with over 35 years in prison. When a person with a terminal illness can’t access the scientific papers outlining new promising research into treatment, they are potentially having years of life stolen from them. Wh