From The Chronicle of Higher Education:
Three summers ago advocates of open-access publishing scored a major victory when the University of California’s Academic Senate voted to make research articles produced by faculty members across the 10-campus system freely available.
Now that big win looks less than overwhelming.
Despite the faculty vote, only about 25 percent of professors systemwide are putting their papers into a state-created repository that allows free outside access. The majority, said Christopher M. Kelty, a professor of information studies and anthropology at the University of California at Los Angeles who helped lead the open-access effort, appear indifferent. “They don’t know about it, they don’t really care about it,” Mr. Kelty said. “They publish their work, and they just go on doing what they do.”
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Quick Comment by Gary Price, infoDOCKET Founder/Editor:
Weren’t libraries and librarians supposed to be a key part of the marketing and sales force for oa concepts, tools, services, and “how to” advice?
Hopefully, things will change at U. of California and at many other institutions where I’ve heard less than impressive deposit rates.
However, at this point, is all of this another example of libraries/librarians being very poor at marketing/selling something we believe to be important?
Library/librarian marketing and sales skills are all over the place. Some strong and effective and others, well, not so impressive. In some cases, library marketing/sales could be made more effective if there was a unified plan and message across the entire community vs. a single institution or even a group of institutions. Are we consulting experts to help us build a marketing/advertising/sales plan? By the way, I realize that all of this is easier said than done.
OR
in the case of open access, have we done enough effective marketing/selling and academics just don’t care, not interested, etc?
Finally, it would be interesting to learn if U. of California academics are depositing their papers and other materials in repositories that do not have a direct relationship to the university? This would go to the idea of possible confusion, lack of time, effort, etc.
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