“Open access starts at home,” says Salo, who sees the profession as “disastrously timid about supporting experimentation and the business models we think preferable, speaking truth to power, even just modeling the behaviors we want faculty to adopt.” Issuing a call to arms, she warns, “We can’t just wring our hands about the serials crisis any longer. If we want results, we need to put our market power and our praxis where our mouth is.”
- Dorothea Salo, Library Journal Movers and Shakers 2009 (as cited by Peter Suber)
I am pleased to announce that my Web page on Open Access Information and Resources is pretty much complete, though I am sure I’ll keep tweaking it and adding content as time goes on (particularly scholarly content on the OA movement).
I made this page as a compliment to my OLA poster session, which I discussed at length in my previous post. Hopefully some of the delegates who took interest in my presentation will find it useful, as well as anyone else who stumbles upon my site.
I got turned on to Open Access about a year ago and it has since become something I am interested in not simply because it’s a “hot” topic right now but because it speaks to the core values of librarianship and the reasons I was drawn to the profession in the first place.
Librarians around the world are getting more and more involved in the OA movement through such things as helping to produce OA journals, setting up and maintaining institutional repositories, and promoting OA initiatives and resources to library users. It’s a hopeful and momentous time for the profession from this vantage point and I hope that it only gets better.
That said, please check out my new Web page and feel free to pass along any comments or suggestions on how I could make it better.
Nothing so conclusively proves a gentleman’s power to lead others as what he is doing daily to steer himself.
Failure does not mean you might be a failure it just means you haven’t succeeded yet.