The Scholar’s Space

As Peter Suber notes at Open Access News (Statement from NIH Director Zerhouni), NIH’s director held a meeting on March 20 that turned out to be sort of a hand-holding kind of thing, or so it appears from reports about it (I wasn’t there). He basically reiterated his belief that this is a good thing, and that with input from the public, we’re all going to get through it just fine. The focus was on implementation issues, not on whether we should do this — that is over — but the comments received before the meeting, summarized at the meeting, indicate that people are still in the mode of thinking about it as something we have to advocate or attach, depending on our point of view.

This may be because proponents of the Public Access Mandate still can’t quite believe it passed, and opponents of the Mandate haven’t given up hope of somehow turning back the clock. We would all be well advised at this point, it would seem, to focus on implementation and thinking about how the *process* can be best managed.

The enactment becomes effective in just one week. Are your plans in place to facilitate your institution’s compliance? Do you have ideas about how the process can be accomplished most efficiently and effectively? Please do share!

The New York Timesreported on Sunday that the advent of online encyclopedias is affecting the production and sale of  printed versions.  It’s worth librarians’ reading simply to recall how many of these things there are now. Most of us think of Widipedia, which is often in the news and sometimes for the wrong reasons. But the famed Britannica   has a digital version, and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy  has been around for awhile, and has emerged as a major resource in that field.  The newly launched Encyclopedia of Life is aiming very high indeed: its goal is to become the summa of biological knowledge. Foreign encyclopedias are looked at also. In Germany, the famous Brockhaus encyclopedia is moving its major articles to an online version, and probably will not appear in print any longer. And the Oxford English Dictionary is temporarily reclassed as an encyclopedia, and discussed. I remember listening to Simon Winchester, who wrote a history of the OED, called The Meaning of Everything, discuss what a new printed edition would look like: forty volumes, weighing about a quarter ton, with a staggering price tag even for the most well-budgeted library. Never happen, and it probably shouldn’t happen on grounds of environmental responsibility.  Digital publishing also gets round one besetting drawback of the printed product: updating. In the past, keeping up meant using supplements and a set of very clever methods to tamper with the text, that still had to fit within the confines of the printed volume. But, that’s all moot with digital publising.  So it seems that the two century  heyday of the printed multi volume reference source for all knowledge is coming to a close. Or maybe what seems to  be an end is just the first stage of a new beginning.

With just under a month to go before we hit the April 7 NIH OA deadline, I hope your campus is scrambling to figure out what, if anything, it needs to do to be on board when the new law goes into effect. The big surprise for me at University of Texas at Austin, was that what had, for seems like forever, been a library OA evangelist’s job, suddenly, overnight, became a matter of institutional “compliance.” OMG. Compliance is not a nice word in libraryland these days (we’ve totally lost whatever control we ever thought we had over information, patrons, etc.). So we went into collaboration with our Office of Sponsored Projects, the folks who handle grant funding processes for all NIH grantees, and thankfully they were interested and capable of responding quickly. We’re on our way towards the deadline without too much trepidation. But still, we don’t exactly have time to celebrate the incredible step forward for open access that this represents. I think I’ll feel more like celebrating when we’ve seen how this works after a year or so.

Here’s what we’ve done:

1. Read the new policy
2. Read Michael Carroll’s excellent summary of institutional options
3. Figure out which one makes the most sense for your institution (we’re going with his number 3)
4. Dot the policy i’s and cross the policy t’s, if any (we are still working on this part, but this is a compliance issue — we don’t have the luxury of 36 months to get everyone on the campus to “buy in” to the idea this is a good thing)
5. Plan an informative briefing session for NIH grantees with materials that can be posted to OSP and Library websites
6. Email the grantees to tell them about the deadline (luckily, we actually have all their names because OSP is able to run neat reports about them)
7. Hope for the best.

I’m sure I’ve forgotten something. Oh, I’m writing a short article for the Center for Intellectual Property‘s Newsletter about what I call the “do nothing” option, and why I think it’s not as attractive as it might appear at first blush. Look for it around first of April.

What’s your story? What are you doing to keep your institution out of NIH hot water?