Open Access, Tenure, and the Common Good

By Barbara Fister. I posted an admittedly rather cranky bit of finger-shaking at Library Journal’s Peer to Peer Review last week chiding academic librarians who can’t be bothered to make their work open access. It seems hypocritical for professionals in our field to advocate for open access without practicing it ourselves. It’s also detrimental to our discipline. Most research in our field is undertaken in order to improve practice. Many academic librarians work in libraries that don't have access to many LIS journals because our collections are shaped around the curriculum, and we don't offer degrees in the field. It’s hard to improve our practice without access to the discipline's research findings. Besides, if we go through the relatively simple steps to make our work open access, we’ll have experiential knowledge about the process that will help us help scholars in other fields who want to make their work available to all. Read more...