This is Open Access Week. That term should yield dozens, more likely hundreds, of blog posts and other items, some of them from people whose thoughts I value quite a bit.
I don’t have much to say at this point. That isn’t because I don’t care.
I used to write about OA quite a bit (and have collected the essays from Cites & Insights into a book you can download for free or buy for essentially the cost of printing, if you’re so inclined–but it’s just a collection, with no new material and no index).
I gave up on OA in C&I in late 2009, for reasons that may or may not be reasonably explained in a full-article essay on Library Access to Scholarship. Basically, I was tired of coping with the extremists on both sides and felt that others, much more knowledgeable, were doing a much better job of covering the field. I felt that I wasn’t really adding much value.
My chance to add value came this Fall–and it should emerge early in 2011 (I’ll post the date as soon as I know it): A Special Report from ALA Editions, currently entitled Open Access: What You Need to Know Now. The “Special Report” moniker means it’s brief (30,000 words), will be a slender 8.5×11 monograph (I’m guessing 80 pages) and was written and is being published on a fast schedule.
I believe it will be a useful summary for library people and, for that matter, others. It covers a lot of ground in a few pages and ends with a whole bunch of good places to go for more information.
That’s about it for my current involvement. For current info and arguments, others do it better…just do that phrase search and see what comes up, including posts from Dorothea Salo, John Dupuis and other library folks.
