It's Simple: Open Access, Open Minds | Peer to Peer Review 

Photo by Debora Miller

Last week I sat down with a faculty member to plan out an instruction session. She wanted to bring her first term seminar students to the library so they could learn how to publish their ideas to the world. The topic of the seminar is "living simply," and they have become passionate enough about the principles and practices that they are discussing in class that they want to have an impact on the wider community. They will need to use library resources to find information, of course, and the teacher long ago set up a date so that they can learn the ropes, as she always does. The surprise was that finding information and writing about it for a grade was not enough. These students think the ideas they've been discussing matter. They have something important to say to their fellow students, so they're coming to the library to get started on publishing using Wordpress; they'll return next week to learn more about doing research.

I love that the library is a place for both things. And I'm thrilled that I have a colleague willing to scrap her syllabus to make it happen.

By coincidence, I just returned from THATCamp Publishing, an unconference under the umbrella of digital humanities events loosely joined and supported by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. I love everything about THATCamp: its openness, its participatory nature, its conviction that having fun and doing good scholarship can happen simultaneously, its willingness to dispense with formalities and mix it up, bringing people with different backgrounds from different disciplines together to make things happen. I learned more about Anthologize, an easy-to-use plug in for Wordpress.org that provides a workspace for organizing and editing blog posts then pushing them through a TEI layer into .pdf and ePub formats. Though this wasn't designed specifically with classroom use in mind, I think it could be a great platform for working with students to go through the process of turning informal discussion and tentative proposals into an edited book. I also learned about Nowcomment, which looks both easy and incredibly useful for involving students in analysis and discussion of documents. These are the kinds of digital tools that students could use to engage in something deeper than finding sources and harvesting snippets to complete school assignments. They can see themselves as authors. They can become publishers of information that has an audience beyond the teacher. And that can change their relationship with knowledge itself.

A failure to communicate
I would love to see our faculty take as great an interest as these students do in turning their ideas into shareable texts. The faculty are, of course, experts in publishing. They know which journals have the highest impact factor scores and rejection rates, they know which university presses when named will cause an appreciative raised eyebrow and which publishers will evince a small wince of pain. They've been schooled in the art of selling themselves to the right publishers so they can in turn sell their CVs to the tenure and promotion committee but haven't given as much thought to how their work, once published, might be shared so that their ideas can advance knowledge. Their livelihoods depend on being able to play the game. Who has time to worry about what happens next? They are too busy finely slicing research into least publishable units and polishing the pitch for their tenure book.

We should worry. It bothers me that academic libraries are no longer a significant market for academic books, that university presses have coped with the shrinking library market by developing lists differently, assuming there simply will not be many copies of their books on library shelves. Who is the audience for these books? Experts in the disciplines who are interested enough to spend quite a lot of money to buy them and perhaps assign them to students. The curious reader who isn't in a position to buy everything they read is not going to encounter these books in library catalogs, only in sales catalogs.

Bundling online books into collections that libraries can license is an approach that is gaining ground. These electronic aggregations of ebooks are a database-like solution to our lack of funding for building local collections of physical objects that need to be individually chosen, cataloged, and housed. Besides, if books are subscriptions, they might at least stay in the competition for funding in a way that printed books do not. But . . . do we really want to do it this way? Have books locked up in a database we lose if we can't come up with the rent?

Yet another licensed database?
If we are going digital, open access books, funded up front and then available to any interested reader, provide a much, much better solution. We're poised on the threshold of disposing of the one thing libraries are most identified with and the one kind of text we still typically handle for which ownership and first sale rights apply. Rather than think about altering the publishing process to make it more open, we're turning the last tangible content that we actually own and can share into just another option for our shopping platforms, available exclusively to paying members of our communities. Is that what libraries are really about?

As I write this, the class hasn't arrived yet and I'm not sure how this session will go. Getting students used to any technology is full of glitches and anxiety-fueled grumpiness. They may start to wonder how their blog posts will be graded. They may decide it's a lot of work for little reward. They may decide their time is better spent studying for that biology exam, given their parents keep hinting that they should major in something that will lead to an actual job.

But I don't think that will happen. These students are coming to the library because they feel they have something to say about living life intentionally, and they want to raise the questions they've been discussing in class in a more public forum. I wish scholars were as passionate about sharing their ideas as these first semester college students are. I wish they thought the ideas they have decided to spend their lives wrestling with mattered beyond a small group of highly-schooled fellow scholars employed at institutions like theirs, ones that can afford the luxury of libraries that primarily exist to get them what they want right now. I wish "advancing knowledge" was a project that benefitted everyone, not just those who can afford to pay for access to an education available to the few.

Maybe when these students graduate, they'll still have some of that passion for ideas. I hope they can show us how to do things differently.