CALIcon10 Ignite Speech

The following is the text of a 5 minute ignite speech that I gave as part of the CALI Conference Friday Plenary.  The formatting will seem odd… those are my slide change breaks.

CALI Ignite Speech

Howdy. My name is Sarah Glassmeyer and I am a librarian. Don’t let the bun and glasses and sensible shoes fool you,  I’m not that kind of librarian. Most librarians aren’t that kind of librarian. Even that librarian isn’t that kind of librarian.   Behind the trappings of librarianship, lies wild eyed revolutionaries.

I thought that there would be no better place than here – in one of the birthplaces of the American Revolution – to talk about a revolution that’s been brewing in libraries. The scholarly communication revolution. And actually, just like the American revolution wasn’t just started in here in Philly

or in Virgina

Or Boston, this revolution isn’t happening just in libraries. All links in the scholarly communication chain – IT professionals, teaching faculty and librarians – have been fighting their individual battles. It is my hope,

That as the individual colonies were able to temporarily at least put aside their differences and unite for a common good, the scholarly communcation players will be able to work together in this cause. Just so there’s no doubt about who the British Empire is in this extended metaphor, I mean commercial information vendors.

Now, contrary to popular belief, I don’t hate information vendors. Many of our founding fathers and mothers didn’t hate the British Empire. I’m just saying that, like the British Empire in revolutionary times,

Vendors have gotten a little heavy handed. And we’ve outgrown them in many ways.

And more to the point, they are bleeding our coffers dry and taxing us to death! So yes, one might say that these are the times that try librarians’ souls.  However, even prior to the recent economic troubles, libraries have been dealing with shrinking budgets and rising subscription costs. We’ve been making due, by limiting acquisitions and services. But finally we have been pushed too far. In the past two weeks

Libraries have finally had their battle of Lexington and Concord

Or maybe it was a Boston Tea Party. I wasn’t a history major so I’m not exactly sure which one

But anyway, here’s what’s happening in California right now. Nature publishing group, publishers of Nature family of scholarly publications among other things, raised the site license for the University of California system by 400%, or a little over a million dollars a year. At a time, mind you, when faculty and staff are being furloughed due to budget cuts. Like I said, this has been happening for years. And libraries have been making due. But not this time..

UC libraries said no. And then Nature Publishing pushed back, and insinuated that UC got a sweetheart deal among other things. But the libraries stood their ground and said “Hell no.” And not only did they say “Hell no”, but they reached out to the UC faculty while doing so. And this is where it gets good. Sit in your office and eat popcorn

As you watch the press releases and blog posts fly good. Because when I say that they reached out to faculty, they didn’t just send an apologetic “we’re going to have to cancel subscriptions or cut back library hours” email. Oh no. Using Nature’s publishings own data and information,

They pointed out to the faculty that their scholarly output, the material that makes up the bulk of the content of these journals, amounts to about $19 million dollars in revenue for Nature publishing. And that’s just uc faculty. No only that, but the faculty provides hundreds of hours of free labor by acting as editors, peer reviewers, and advisory board members. So faculty, and by extension the university, have been giving Nature publishing all of this millions of dollars of product and effort…which Nature then sells back to the university.

As one librarian recently pointed out, this isn’t much different than the movie and book “fight club” where characters made soap from liposuctioned fat which they then sold to the rich women that had the lipo in the first place. After pointing these facts out to the teaching faculty, the libraries asked the faculty to join them and break this cycle.  The library suggested that they faculty boycott Nature publishing in all ways.

So. Here’s my challenge to the teaching faculty in the room: if you haven’’t already, join this revolution. Stop relying upon commercial vendors to disseminate your work. Put your scholarlship in open repositories. Only submit to OA journals. Encourage your institutions’ publications to become open and Durham Statement compliant. Quit all of your editor and advisory board gigs and hassle your colleagues to do the same.

Write a case book for CALI instead of a large publisher. Or at least only assign oa casebooks and articles to your students. Perhaps at some point we will find similar open publishers for treatises and practice materials. I know I know BELIEVE ME I KNOW about the promotion and tenure hustle and that you need real publications. So you need to also encourage your colleagues to accept these alternate publbication streams.  This is not going to be an easy or fun process.

But it must be done. Because I’m telling y’all now, we cannot continue the way we are going. And if libraries have to keep fighting this battle all alone, we will lose. Our collections will become decimated as will our ability to provide anything but the most basic of services. Your research abilities will suffer and your students will be turning even worse papers than they are now.

But if we stand together, and the free law people are able to provide accurate and authentic primary law, and the law schools are able to provide stable sources of journals and maybe some other secondary materials, and the IT professionals build and support the systems that do this, that will us some leverage when we negotiate with vendors and open up library budgets to purchase lots of other things  that we can’t provide for ourselves as well as allow librarians to  concentrate our time and effort towards user education and services.

So again, my name is Sarah Glassmeyer and I am a librarian.  This is the kind of librarian I am.  If you have any questions or would like to discuss this further, here is my contact information. Thank you.