I â¥â¥â¥ this essay by Barbara Fister: Washington, We Have a Problem at Library Journal.
Go read it.
More like this
My previous post was about Brian Mathews moving his blog to the Chronicle, a non-librarian blog network.
Those of you who follow me on Twitter know that I pay quite close attention to the InsideHigherEd web magazine.
The very fine TEDxLibrariansTO team is counting down to this Saturday's big event with some daily questions for us all to consider.
The topic, of course, is Librarians as Thought Leaders!
There is more than one fly in the soup of open access publication and one deals with the role that non-profit scientific societies play in publishing science. Generally their journals are among the more reasonably priced, often bargains of price/quality optimalization. Such publications provide libraries with a lot of bang for the subscription buck, but open access fundamentalism threatens to sink these publishers even though they aren't the problem.
In general I agree that the largest part of the problem is not caused by society publishers. There are a few notable exceptions. There are OA fundamentalists - but in case you haven't noticed, I'm not one of them. The linked piece points out some of the faulty reasoning by the OA opponents. Societies publish as a service to their members, science, and society. If they are no longer needed for the publishing function, they still might run reviewer bureaus (bureaux?), conferences, and do other things that they do now. I'm not out to get them, believe me.