The recent publication of The Access Principle by John Willinsky has occasioned discussion in forums that don’t typically address the question of Open Access. One of these venues is the New England Journal of Medicine, whose April 13th issue included a book review / anti-OA editorial by Martin Frank.

Like many Open Access critics, Frank quotes worst-case numbers for the potential costs of an OA model — numbers that have been cast into doubt other places. In addition, he seems to have a special animus towards the National Institutes of Health’s new Public Access policy. He hints darkly:

The ready availability of content on PubMed Central could lead to subscription cancellations and accelerate the transition to an author-pays publishing model, the economic implications of which are not adequately evaluated by Willinsky.

While such concerns may be understandable, experience with the arXiv e-print repository suggests that conventional publishing and freely available content can indeed co-exist. At any rate, subscription cancellations are already a seemingly permanent part of the library landscape. Spiraling costs have pushed the current system of scholarly communication towards the brink of unsustainability.

Frank’s final point bears close examination, particularly since this is exactly where the strongest argument for Open Access resides:

At a time of shrinking budgets for biomedical research, does it make sense to spend scarce dollars on publication costs instead of on research to develop treatments and cures for disease?

To which one could just as easily reply, “Does it make sense to spend scarce dollars on research, only to consign the results to a place where they might never be seen by the people that could build upon them?”

Anecdotal evidence suggests that our faculty are becoming much like our undergraduates: if they can’t open the full-text directly from a citation, they often don’t bother with an article. Leveraging limited resources and ensuring the widest possible use of research is precisely why Open Access is not just a librarian’s issue, but one of critical importance to scholarship as a whole.

In a recent post, T. Scott Plutchak discusses a recent meeting with Elsevier management:

It’s too bad that more librarians can’t spend the kind of time with some of the senior people at Elsevier that I was able to this week. It’s tough to demonize people when you’ve had food and drink with them and have talked passionately about what you believe to be the social importance of what you’re doing. And make no mistake — the people I talked with do believe passionately in the role they play in the whole knowledge creation chain. They believe they are doing good things. I was very impressed with their openness, their eagerness to listen to what I had to say, and their very thoughtful questions and discussion.

I’m sure that’s true to a great extent, and there’s certainly no point in demonizing people who, after all, are just trying to make a honest living.

But the fundamental economic structure of the situation does not change, regardless of whether we think these folks are on the side of good or evil. Elsevier’s primary responsibility is not to researchers, not to librarians, but to its investors. These investors are now used to (and rather like) seeing 30% margins from STM publishing. It’s difficult to see how any management team, whatever its good intentions, would act to disturb those margins. If they did, they would arguably be in breach of their fiscal duties.

But until that 30% margin does change, Libraries are always going to be in a terrible bind insofar as they try to actually pay for the journals their users demand. And that, more than misunderstanding or ill will, is what makes a true partnership between libraries and for-profit publishers hard to imagine.

The place I call home most weekdays, aka NELINET, is trying a new experiment. Trend Gauge ™ is where you’ll find a host of interesting thoughts about the future of libraries in New England and beyond. It’s also the place where you’ll find the occasional “reprint” from this blog right here.

I recently returned from a trip to Washington DC, where I had a chance to see a really interesting session at the 97th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research. The topic was caBIG, an ambitious attempt by the National Cancer Institute to build an infrastructure to support data exchange among bioinformaticists.

Modern science is growing ever more data-intensive — a researcher using a DNA microarray is often looking at expression changes for hundreds of genes at once. Getting the data is the easier part of the equation: testing it, normalizing it and figuring out what it all means in the context of the literature is the fun bit.

So where do libraries fit in all this? It’s interesting to note that one of the main areas of caBIG research involves the question of vocabularies and ontologies, an area where we can claim some expertise. The University of Illinois School of Library and Information Science is now offering a Concentration in Bioinformatics. Closer to home, the Countway Library at Harvard Medical School recently reorganized, placing bioinformatics at the forefront of its efforts.

I realize that a lot of this falls outside of our comfort zone. After all, our focus has always been more on the dissemination of digested knowledge than that of raw data. But if our fundamental job is to to support the efforts of our researchers (and I mean the term in its broadest sense, from report-writing fifth graders to high-energy physicists), then this is a area we need to explore.

There has been a lot of talk throughout the biblioblogosphere to the effect that more librarians need to be coders. As always, there’s some question of how much this meme has percolated through the wider community, so to summarize:

Most librarians don’t know much about programming, and this lack has contributed to an online user experience that is a lot less interactive and useful than it should be.

And I think in many ways this is right on target.
(more…)