Lots of links
The Loon is a bit behind on syllabus construction; she’d like to comment on some of these more thoroughly, but in lieu of that:
- The indispensable Heather Piwowar builds an awfully nice data vision and policy statement for the NSF.
- On librarian labor casualization, this: “If the Harvard Law Library can be folded into a central library system, what law library cannot? The battle for autonomy in law libraries has been fought for decades in the ABA Standards, as has the importance of faculty status for law librarians. It is lamentable but true that faculty status has taken hits in recent years. Now the concept of the autonomy of law libraries is in peril. American law school deans have long chafed at library expenditures. Will they defend them from usurpation?”
- Calls from faculty to stop donating authorship, review, and editorial labor to bad-actor publishers: Peter Suber and Dorothy Bishop. See also Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s lyrical call-to-action for the humanities.
- Wayne Bivens-Tatum notes that RWA says “don’t” to federal agencies, not specifically to researchers. The ultimate effect is perhaps debatable; the knock-on effects of RWA enactment, the Loon still thinks, would inject a lot of “don’t” into conversations with faculty.
With respect to that last… The Loon holds a belief she hopes not to test: that if RWA passes, the AAP will come to rue the day it did. There is some precedent for this belief; several overreaches from within AAP ranks have backfired. Hiring Eric Dezenhall. Starting the PRISM Coalition. Beating down the first NIH attempt to enact a public-access policy. NPG trying to shank California. Every time, the open-access movement struck back—and every time, more faculty became aware of the issues. A fraction of those changed their thinking; a fraction of those became actual activists.
It’s a slow-bleed way of losing, this, but losing it is nonetheless. (It’s also deeply witless; the AAP needs to turf out its strategists for continually coming up with the same loser tactics. Though the Loon perhaps says so as shouldn’t, considering libraries’ trajectory around green open access.) Again, the Loon hopes and believes the RWA game will not play out this way, but if that’s how it plays, so be it.