>>>>> "Keith" == Keith Lofstrom <[email protected]> writes:
Keith> I'm just back from a weekend conference and a few days in the Keith> San Jose / Palo Alto area, which I had intended to spend doing Keith> research in the Stanford libraries. Stanford used to have the Keith> best physics/technical library on the West Coast. [...] My wife is an academic reference librarian, which gives me unearned license to rant with (ungranted) proxy-authority on this. Academic publishing *in general* has been a clusterfuck for at least 20 years. The "Serials Crisis" was a major topic of discussion in the 1990s in librarian circles. Only recently have the slightest glimmers of hope appeared with things like PLOS and similar open-access journals. Since the "digital revolution" libraries have increasingly transitioned from functioning as communal longterm archives of knowledge (which *ought* no longer be needed in many cases), to communal purchasers of access to archives of information, hoarded and controlled by capitalistic gatekeepers (called "vendors" in librarian vernacular) who neither produce, fund, edit nor otherwise add anything of value to, except for maintaining brand-name journal titles that academics stupidly pay to get published in, and then (indirectly) are gouged to get access to, all to maintain a business model that should have died with the invention of the Internet. Academic authors do not have any interest in restricting distribution of their work. They don't get paid by the copy. They get paid by their institutions or by grants. The more widely disseminated, the better for them, their readers and society in general. Restricting distribution benefits only the vendor. Librarians still have an important job to help people find information, but increasingly they are becoming the customer-facing representatives of the vendors, not paid by the vendors, but indirectly by the users, yet another outsourced cost. Don't blame the libraries, although some are more short-sighted than others. Blame the vendors (including IEEE and ACM) that are in many ways forcing this transition, exploiting insane copyright laws to squeeze every drop of revenue from the work of others, pushing libraries to drop institutional subscriptions to hardcopy through rapacious fees, replaced by temporary year-to-year licenced and overseen acccess to electronic versions. And blame academia in general for submitting to this scam, even (or particularly) if done in blithe ignorance. And blame the writers of the stupid copyright laws, for all the good it will do you. </rant> -- Russell Senior, President [email protected] _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
