I have just returned from Amman, Jordan, working with the General Assemblee of eIFL, a network of library consortia representing well over 3,000 libraries in almost 50 countries, serving over 8 million users. They do a lot of work on "Open Access", to make books and content available in countries in development and in transition. Advocacy work to make sure that authors have alternatives to giving up the rights to their own work, and the new role a librarian can have in dealing with such issues on behalf of research staff, while negotiating with the big publishers.
Paul Peters of Hindawi Publishing Corporation in Cairo explained how they have built a growing company out of material available under Creative Commons licenses, very much along the same lines as software companies produce open source software: the creator pays to make the initial version, after that the cost of reproduction is nearly zero.
The reasoning of Hindawi and Open Access: few authors are driven by a need (or possibility?) to create income from selling copies of their work. Most are writing to get maximum exposure of their ideas or research, so any barrier to distribution should be eliminated. Exposure will generate better opportunities to attract funding or better-yielding other engagements: jobs, speeches, project opportunities.
Hindawi lets authors pay to publish, with an interesting side effect: the costs are covered by research or institution budgets, rather than library budgets. Library budgets are under pressure. The big publishers charge more, and often only offer "package deals": a library can only buy all publications for a "slightly higher" price, and then often has to give up subscriptions to small publishers, to receive a lot of irrelevant content for a few titles of interest.
It reduces the possibilities a librarian has to fulfill her or his role as "local knowledge broker", and it brings my mind back to talks with Maja van der Velden and her research and writings about the importance of "indigenous knowledge" and the politics of "ownership of" and "gatekeepers of" information.
It all starts to come together now: communication rights, copyrights, access rights, open source. As Michael Moore already stated, "You think they're just sitting there at the desk, all quiet and everything. They're like plotting the revolution, man. I wouldn't mess with them."
