It's not that my muse has deserted me, so much that it's
become a bit scattered lately. And, more to the point, I
just haven't felt strongly motivated to write anything for
the past few weeks. However, it's been a long time since I
let a whole (calendar) month go by in silence, and for some
reason I'm reluctant to do so now, so I'd better dash
something off before November draws to its rapidly impending
close.
When it comes to finding things to write about, though
.. well, we've got the big stuff, that stubbornly fails to
cohere into a pithy phlog post. And then we've got the
small stuff, that's maybe too trivial to be of much interest
- to others certainly, and possibly even to myself.
But if we can look past its triviality, maybe the small
stuff can at least gesture in the direction of something of
greater import. Let's give it a shot.
As the title says, this is about a Work Thing, which as
faithful readers will no doubt recall, means it's a
University Library Thing. Moreover, it falls into the
categories of Something That Almost Never Happens, and also
possibly A Reversal of the Natural Order.
Which is to say, our Library is (or soon will be) cancelling
our subscriptions to the online versions of several Canadian
academic journals. So far, so unremarkable - we cancel
journal subscriptions all the time. But in this case, we
will be replacing our online subscriptions with print
subscriptions. And yes, I do mean dead trees shaved fine,
bound into tidy packages, delivered via our increasingly
under-resourced postal service, ultimately resident on
shelves, etc. Like how we did libraries back when we lived
in caves. And that is unusual.
What happened, see, was that a certain Canadian University
Press (CUP) signed an exclusive deal with a Large American
Distributor (LAD), under the terms of which Our University
Library (OUL) can only subscribe to the online versions of
CUP content from LAD. Meanwhile, LAD has taken inspiration
from the ECC (last two letters stand for Cable Company)
that, as we all know, conveniently chunks up its content
such that it is impossible to subscribe to everything you
want, unless you also pay a small fortune to subscribe to a
bunch of stuff you don't want, as well. In other words,
instead of offering CUP content in one convenient package,
it is spread out across a whole whack of other packages in
such a way that we'd have to spend many tens of thousands of
dollars to subscribe to the few journals we want, that clock
a few hundred PDF article downloads per month.
So we're saying, to heck with that (or words to that
effect), and going old school. I suggested that maybe we
could sell this initiative to faculty by calling this the
"printphile" edition, kind of like how audiophiles prefer
vinyl records. I'm not sure this suggestion will be taken
very seriously, although it may be taken as seriously as it
deserves. Be that as it may, I have to say I'm proud of OUL
for taking this stand (it wasn't my call).
Parenthetically, it does kind of surprise me that there even
are print editions of these journals, at this point in time.
So many academic journals have gone online-only, as the
market for print (never that large to begin with) has more
or less dried up in recent years. (And I can foresee a time
when academic libraries might not even have shelves to put
things on, though I'm pleased to note we're a long way from
that ourselves.) Anyhow, good thing that, in this case at
least, there was an alternative, as absurd as it
fundamentally is.
Finally, I would be remiss if I failed to note that all of
this is just plain crazy, that universities are subject to
this kind of price gouging. But we have only ourselves to
blame. We could have taken ownership of the means of
academic publication back in the 90s and made our research
literature freely accessible to whoever wanted to read it,
if we'd been on the ball. Instead we continued to shovel
money at commercial publishers and distributors, who use
their monopolies to extract exhorbitant rents, and lock our
research (much of it publicly funded, by the way) away
behind paywalls.
But counterfactual expeditions to the fabled land of Open
Access Publishing have been wandering about for years, and I
know from hard-won experience the well-worn trail of thought
we are presently following leads only into dry and leafless
thickets of verbiage wholly unsuited to the humble medium of
the phlog. Let us rest instead on this convenient, newly
arrived box of periodicals, eat our sandwiches, and
contemplate the evening sun lighting up the freshly bound
volumes on the shelves.
