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 | In New Job, Harvard Professor Downplays the Role of “Revolutionary”
Last week, Harvard University professor Stuart Shieber made history—he was named the first director of Harvard’s newly minted Office for Scholarly Communication (OSC). In his new role, Shieber will oversee the implementation of the university’s groundbreaking open access mandate, which he helped author, and which many suggest could have wide-ranging implications for the future of scholarly communication. “Let’s not go overboard,” Shieber says with a laugh and an audible wince when asked if he views his new role as a historic opportunity. “People like to extrapolate that [the mandate] will have a revolutionary effect. But you can’t make a policy based on that extrapolation. Sometimes there’s too much talk about momentous, revolutionary effects, it gets too far in front of what is really happening. There are lots of things going on, and there will be changes. We’re just trying to do our part.”
That sober approach should be heartening to observers concerned with getting the implementation rolling. In a conversation with the LJ Academic Newswire this week, Shieber embraced a straightforward mission “to support the efforts of the Harvard faculty to make their collective scholarly output as broadly available as possible.” It’s a big job, Shieber conceded, and one he didn’t necessarily expect to fall to him, despite his role in authoring the policy. “Certainly, there was no lobbying effort,” he laughed, when asked if he had expected to be tapped to lead the OSC. “But I have spent lots of time and effort on these issues, so it was a natural fit.”
Among the first, and perhaps the most central of his initial tasks, will be to establish the online repository that will be the fulcrum of Harvard’s OA mandate. “In theory, it is as simple as downloading some open source software and turning it on,” he said, “in practice, many complexities come up, such as having it work well with other systems already in place at the university.” Nevertheless, work on the repository is progressing, he says, and a beta could be in place shortly. Another big part of his new role will be outreach to faculty.
Perhaps the most engaging—if still unformed—aspect of Shieber’s new job, however, will be developing how Harvard will support and work with open access journals. “The OSC pertains not just to the open access policy, it’s broader,” he explains. “The policy offers open access the articles directly, essentially through author self-archiving. To the extent that we need to find alternative business models, it behooves Harvard to support those alternative business models.”
Shieber said he is looking at a few options to support open access journals. One is to work with the Harvard University Press (HUP), which he called an important ally. He said he has had many discussions with HUP about how the activities of the press and fit with the OSC, noting that HUP will soon publish its first journal in years, the Journal of Legal Analysis—an open access, faculty edited journal. “My hope is that this will be the first of several OA journals HUP will start to run. HUP is a likely venue by which Harvard can support OA journals.”
More broadly, Shieber’s goal is to see OA journals exist on “equal footing” with subscription-based journals. As of now, he says, they do not, because much of the money that underwrites the services of subscription-based journals comes from libraries while the money that underwrites OA journals comes mostly from author charges. “Authors don’t get underwriting help from the library when they publish in OA journals, while they do from publishing in subscription-based journals,” he explains. To put OA and subscription journals on a “level playing field,” he suggests, “you’d want to underwrite OA journals just as you do subscription journals.”
Both Shieber, and his co-sponsor in the FAS mandate, university librarian Robert Darnton, say they are confident of a continuing, vital role for academic journals in an open access future, and note that there has been much discussion at Harvard over whether OA might induce “a blowback effect” on the stability of those journals or peer review. Both believe the evidence does not threaten either journals or peer review, but “that doesn’t mean there is no uncertainty there,” Shieber added. “You can’t just say ‘don’t worry.’ You have too look at these issues. What we do know is we couldn’t keep going the way we had been going. We know that is not sustainable.”
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EPA Libraries Reopening, but in Unsatisfactory Spaces?
Congress has ordered the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to reopen its shuttered libraries, but watchdog group PEER (Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility) say the agency is “grudgingly allocating only minimal space and resources” to the effort, and has installed a political appointee to oversee the libraries. According to PEER associate director Carol Goldberg EPA has installed one appointee, Molly O’Neill, the assistant administrator for environmental information, as “library czar” in charge of all library operations. “Even as many collections remain in crates, EPA has decided to micromanage what is left,” Goldberg said in a statement, noting that the agency has still not accounted for many of the library holdings it had removed. “Professional librarians should be making these management decisions, not political appointees.”
Meanwhile, Goldberg said libraries were reopening in inadequate spaces. The plan for the Chicago library, the agency states, formerly the largest regional library serving the six-state Great Lakes area, has the library reopening in “a vacant reception area on the 16th floor of a federal building,” occupying less than one-tenth of the space it previously did, an area “only slightly larger than the typical men’s restroom in that same building.” In Dallas, the library that once served a region covering five states will now operate as “two staff workstations and 1 patron workstation, each with a PC, desk, and chair,” and will only open for six hours a day, four days a week. “A library requires more space than a lavatory,” Goldberg fumed, adding that the insufficient plans appear to violate Congress’s order to “restore the network of EPA libraries.”
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| Reed Elsevier Completes Exit from Defense Exhibits Business
Reed Elsevier today announced that it has completed the sale of its defense exhibitions effective immediately. In a brief release, the company said it sold the businesses, which organizes so-called “arms fairs,” to Clarion Events, following through on a pledge to withdraw from the defense exhibitions sector it announced in 2007. The sale was spurred by protests from scientific and medical associations, which petitioned the company to dump the businesses, charging an ideological divide over one part of Reed Elsevier’s business facilitating medicine and science and another part the sale of weaponry. Reed Elsevier CEO Crispin Davis last year readily acknowledged the concerns of “growing numbers of important customers and authors” and concluded that the defense shows were “no longer compatible with Reed Elsevier’s position as a leading publisher of scientific, medical, legal and business content.”
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| Deep Indexing Exposes Graphical Content—and Librarians Want More!
Close to 200 attendees took part in a May 20 Library Journal webcast Deep Indexing: A New Approach to Searching Scholarly Literature, sponsored by ProQuest. While a majority of those participating were from the United States, librarians and electronic resource coordinators from 17 other countries also joined in, making it the most “international” of webcasts so far in the LJ series. An archive of the webcast will be available for year from the Library Journal web site, and can be found here.
Carol Tenopir, editor of LJ's Online Databases column, kicked off the panel by providing background on the research behind the development of “tables and graphs” indexing, now known as deep indexing. Her partner in research, Robert Sandusky from the Richard J. Daley Library, University of Illinois at Chicago, offered his insights on the relevancy of types of searching and indexing for various disciplines, particularly the sciences.
Two practitioners added real-life examples of the advantages to deep indexing as part of the discovery process. Emily Schmitt, a biology professor from Nova Southeastern University, cited the research work she requires of her upper level undergrads and how being able to get to graphs and tables is important to her students, and to their future success in the fields of medicine, science, and technology. The ability to get to enhanced content without making researchers change their habits has been key to the discovery of deep indexed content through CSA databases at the Colorado School of Mines Arthur Lakes Library, reported Lisa Dunn, head of reference. “They don’t want another database—they just want to get everything from the ones they use now,” Dunn stated.
Dunn also emphasized the need for patience, suggesting that at Mines, it can take six months or longer for faculty and students to adopt new data sources, even with the library’s marketing efforts. ProQuest’s Mark Hyer followed up with some nuts and bolts discussion on CSA Illustrata Natural Sciences, the company’s first deep indexed database, and predicted exponential growth in the amount of content that will be exposed due to deep indexing. The Q&A session, open to all attendees reflected a broad range of discussion, from digital object identifier registration to the use of metadata, and deep indexing of open access journals, PDFs, and web sites.
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Best Sellers in U.S. History, October 2007–present, as compiled by YBP Library Services
(13-digit ISBNs in brackets)
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What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848
Howe, Daniel Walker
Oxford University Press
2007. ISBN 0195078942 [9780195078947]. $35.00
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This Republic Of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War
Faust, Drew Gilpin
Alfred A Knopf
2008. ISBN 037540404x [9780375404047]. $27.95
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American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic
Ellis, Joseph J.
Alfred A Knopf
2007. ISBN 030726369x [9780307263698]. $26.95
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Clinging To Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America
McLeay, Mick
Harvard University Press
2007. ISBN 0674024338 [9780674024335]. $27.95
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Race Card: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse
Ford, Richard
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
2008. ISBN 0374245754 [9780374245757]. $26.00
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America's Three Regimes: A New Political History
Keller, Morton
Oxford University Press
2007. ISBN 0195325028 [9780195325027]. $27.95
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Long Overdue: The Politics of Racial Reparations
Henry, Charles P.
New York University
2007. ISBN 0814736920 [9780814736920]. $29.95
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Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom: Including Their Own Narratives of Emancipation
Blight, David W.
Harcourt Trade
2007. ISBN 0151012326 [9780151012329]. $25.00
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Unfinished Business: Racial Equality in American History
Klarman, Michael J.
Oxford University Press
2007. ISBN 0195304284 [9780195304282]. $19.95
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Harriet Tubman: Myth, Memory, and History
Sernett, Milton C.
Duke University Press
2007. ISBN 0822340526 [9780822340522]. $89.95
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For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War
Leffler, Melvyn P.
Hill & Wang
2007. ISBN 0809097176 [9780809097173]. $35.00
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Age of American Unreason
Jacoby, Susan
Pantheon
2008. ISBN 0375423745 [9780375423741]. $26.00
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My Dearest Friend: Letters of Abigail and John Adams
Adams, John, 1735-1826
Hogan, Margaret, (editor)
Belknap Harvard
2007. ISBN 0674026063 [9780674026063]. $35.00
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God's Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights
Marsh, Charles
Princeton University Press
2008. ISBN 0691130671 [9780691130675]. $18.95
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Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America's First Presidential Campaign
Larson, Edward J.
Free Press
2007. ISBN 0743293169 [9780743293167]. $27.00
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Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race
Gomez, Laura E.
New York University
2007. ISBN 0814731740 [9780814731741]. $35.00
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Act of Justice: Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and the Law of War
Carnahan, Burrus M.
University Press of Kentucky
2007. ISBN 0813124638 [9780813124636]. $40.00
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Race, Equality, and the Burdens of History
Arthur, John
Cambridge University Press
2007. ISBN 052187937x [9780521879378]. $80.00
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Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win
Steele, Shelby
Free Press
2008. ISBN 1416559175 [9781416559177]. $22.00
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America Beyond Black and White: How Immigrants and Fusions Are Helping Us Overcome the Racial Divide
Fernandez, Ronald
University of Michigan Press
2007. ISBN 0472116096 [9780472116096]. $29.95
Library Journal Academic Newswire
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