One of the movements sweeping the world of academic publishing is the Open Access movement. I didn’t realllly get it until I attended some sessions on the topic at the CLA Annual Conference. And then had to explain it to non-librarians (the true test of knowledge).

I had to sum up my job to parents, and in doing so, found myself explaining in the simplest terms possible, the whole “Open Access” movement. I told them this:

1) Professors make research. It is expensive! But important. So the government gives the universities money to do it.

2) Their research is brilliant! So they want to share it with others by publishing it in a journal. Also, if they don’t publish in some really prestigious journals, they don’t get tenure. Tenure is where you get some job security and a nice-sized paycheque.

3) They don’t get paid to put their work in those journals, though. It’s like getting paid to receive the Order of Canada – just being there is enough prestige.

4) Those journals have important information in them! And universities need that information so people can do research. They work with libraries to get those journals into the library collections.

5) These journals can cost tens of thousands of dollars a year. It is expensive! But important. So the government gives the universities money to do it.

You’ll note that two of these stages are the same. Open Access just seeks to cut out the last stage, so that tax payers aren’t paying for that research twice (There are a lot of other really good reasons that OA is awesome, but that’s the explanation that resonates the most with my parents. No doubt they agree with concepts related to freedom of information and a narrowing of the global digital divide, but taxes – that really gets ‘em).

A big report just came out from the Knowledge Exchange in Europe, which discusses the economic savings of Open Access policies for research bodies. Among the most interesting points is the assertion that,  “Open access or ‘author-pays’ publishing for journal articles… might bring net system savings of around EUR 70 million per annum nationally in Denmark, EUR 133 million in the Netherlands and EUR 480 million in the UK (at 2007 prices and levels of publishing activity…”.

So, beside the important ethical and technological merits of this movement, there’s an even more salient reason for institutions to pursue economic policies… And it is called the bottom line.

The CLA Conference was held here, at the Palaise de Congress in Montreal. Colourful!

Bruce Harpham and I presented at the poster session. Our topic – near and dear to my heart – evaluated students’ perceptions of professional development opportunities at the Faculty of Information. We looked at whether students were successful in securing employment during the summer between first and second year, and whether their career aspirations changed throughout their MISt degree. It was a great experience to follow from a research problem and design, right through to synthesis and presentation of results.

"Hello, welcome to our poster! Please, take a handout!"

I went to a full roster of sessions pertaining to all sorts of cool stuff – Joseph Janes being hilarious about the future of libraries, Mount St. Vincent developing a credit-course on Information Literacy, a video-game developed to teach students about academic integrity, and how copyright is ruining everyone’s lives and destroying the whole world – delightful, fascinating topics!

In particular, I attended several academic library sessions and the topics were great. Here’s a sampling of the issues that came up:

Open Access: This is an issue that continues to be at the forefront of scholarly communications debates in academia. Librarians are in an interesting position because we engage with scholarly publications on so many levels: As authors and researchers; through support for faculty publication and authorship; and as professionals who are all about free and open access to information. Oh, and as those who have seen their budgets decimated by journal subscription fees and crazy access agreements.

Information Literacy: As the risk of sounding like a big jerk: Traditional IL is broken. Students do not need a one-off every September about how to access the catalogue.

Luckily there are several go-get-em librarians in this country who are eager to fix it! Mount St. Vincent librarians have successfully implemented a credit-course on Information Literacy that is open to all students at the university. One of their librarians, Meg Raven also did some AMAZING and BRILLIANT research on students’ and faculty perceptions regarding student’s research habits. When the slides are posted on the CLA website, I will be sure to post them here, since – effectively – students’ expectations for their research, and professors’ expectations for student’s research are OPPOSITE.
INVERSE.
NOT THE SAME AT ALL.
It’s totally nuts.

Academic Integrity: Along with the IL issue, and flowing nicely into the Copyright issue, is the fact that it is easy for students to copy+paste stuff off the Internet. We need to teach them that that is a terrible idea. There are many fascinating initiatives academic librarians are undertaking to tackle this issue, from the aforementioned video game, to workshops on information synthesis and ethical research. This is an issue that has come up as a concern among faculty at York as well, so no doubt I will be grappling with issues of plagiarism, citation and information synthesis in the future.

Copyright: Well this is a dizzying issue. And terrifying. And infuriating. But mostly just confusing.

We had a fantastic panel, including a presentation from Margaret Ann Wilkinson, possibly the smartest person on the planet, and faculty at Western Law School. It’s frightening how much of a risk we really take with digital information formats. There are some key class action lawsuits raging between authors and publishing houses over digital content that has profound implications for academic libraries. I’m pretty sure the only people who actually understand the issues are the lawyers though, so one can’t help but feel helpless about the whole mess.

In a workshop on academic integrity at college libraries, the notion of a “Copyright Help Desk” came up; librarians are being approached more and more about issues of intellectual property, copyright, patents and pirating and simply don’t know the answers/don’t want to risk libel. Fascinating but scary (and possibly very expensive, depending on how those law suits go).

For awhile now, I have been a member of the Facebook group “Fair Copyright for Canada,” which is administered by Geist himself (to date there are almost 60,000 members. Join! Everyone else is doing it…). It’s a great way to get some important insights about the state of legislation, and Geist is balanced in his approach. When he first got his paws on the documentation upon it’s release (formally known as Bill C-61), he blogged about the content, but reserved his judgement until he had some time to really process the implications of this bill. It took him about a half a day before he tore into the legislation to shreds and encouraging Canadians to join the mounting protest against this bill.

Before I started my MISt at U of T, I had never heard of the intellectual property debates (beyond the obligatory 18-year-old-outrage at Big Pharma and Big Music… remember Napster?). However over this past year, I’ve become more aware of the implications this, and other legislation have for my profession.

What is particularly ironic about this bill is when you consider the history of copyright law and its original intent. It began as an artifice that sought to stimulate creative culture-making in the American colonies; the Courts realized it contradicted the radically liberal ideology the U.S. was predicated on but saw it as a “necessary” evil, to ensure that authors, poets, playwright’s and the like could make a living off their creations.

In our digital age though, creativity has taken on a new face and laws should adapt accordingly; the goal of the original intellectual property laws was to invigorate the creative class and to foster cultural literacy among the citizenry. This value should be at the core of today’s legislation as well, and, as many have argued, such is not the case. Laura Murry from www.faircopyright.ca states the following:

(Imagine) you’re a librarian trying to stretch dollars by sending interlibrary loan materials digitally. Fine, the bill says, but make sure that file will evaporate automatically within five days. Not only is this requirement a technical and therefore financial burden on libraries, but it goes against their whole ethos of sharing knowledge. Librarians and teachers will be ever more confused and constrained; the kids and patrons will be ever more confused and… well maybe not so constrained. Won’t that be a pretty pickle? We could have had a clarified treatment of fair dealing, taught to kids from the getgo, which could have helped to rescue the idea of copyright.

Not such a hot option for librarians who will likely become insta-criminals should this bill pass. I can just imagine the level of creativity that will be stymied by this, and I hope you, like me, will write your MP and explain why they should quash this bill come September.