So this happened. (Karen Coyle, “This is what sexism looks like, #3.”)
Shameful (“P” and the misuse of a code of conduct and the mansplaining and the WILLFUL IGNORANCE both of knowledgeable women and of all librarians have done for OA since at least 1989).
But not, unfortunately, surprising.
I’m not going to explain the issues here. Karen Coyle and a bunch of other real librarians (which I’m not) are far more qualified to do that explaining. (“Bunch of others…” includes, of course, Dorothea Salo and Jenica Rogers and Barbara Fister and Nancy Sims and…the list goes on and on.
Also, frankly, because I’ve encountered enough OA advocates with THE ANSWER who either regard libraries and librarians as irrelevant or beat them up for not throwing themselves (librarians) under the bus to push THE ANSWER and who pretty uniformly ignore all the work librarians (and hangers-on like me) have done…sorry, that sentence got away from me. In short, The Man With The Plan in all his iterations–and there’s a reason I’m not using my preferred non-gendered they/their pronouns here–doesn’t want to hear that the real world is complicated and that this has been going on for a long time.
Those of you who’ve been reading my stuff know that I’m not a sycophant for Karen Coyle or anybody else; fact is, we’ve had some pretty sharp disagreements. And in this case, I have every reason to believe she’s right (as is frequently the case).
Shameful.
