librarypunk - 002 - open.access

Episode Date: February 7, 2021

This episode we talk about butts, boob windows, and open access. 

Joe Biden, where's my fucking money? Welcome to Library Punk, the only podcast hosted from the Down with Sis Bus. Okay. My name is Justin. I am a scholarly communications librarian. My pronouns are he and him. I'm Sadie. I am an IT administrator at a public library, and my pronouns are she, her, or they, them?

I'm Carrie, and I'm an academic health sciences librarian. And my pronouns are she, her. And I'm Jay. I am a metadata and discovery librarian at an academic library, and I'm like all fancy tenure track faculty, so I have to do this scholarly publishing stuff all the time. And my pronouns are he, him, and they, them. So I didn't think we didn't get the maker space conversation, but I think we're going to now have to do a maker space episode just so I'm completely caught up on. Carries feelings. Yeah, carries traumas. The not recorded discourse before this call.

I mean, I don't think they're the worst things ever. I'm just salty about a particular maker space incident. I definitely want to hear about the maker space for MLMs, though. Like, that is... I really want to know about like the Mormon multi-level marketing maker space. The MMLN.

It's called the Temple and we don't talk about it. LDSMLN, actually. I mean, the whole thing, never mind. Yeah, Sadie's got secrets too. Yeah. Okay, well, I didn't think I was going to do this segment again so quickly, but what's wrong at ALA? So a member of the LibRev Discussion Group informed some people on Twitter that ALA Library's legal counsel

appears to be a union-busting lawyer slash law firm. It's called Barnes and Thornburg, and you should send them faxes with just all black paper. Are you sure that's not like a deep cover for Barnes & Noble, the mortal enemy of

all libraries? Probably. I mean, Barnes & Noble is not making any money anymore. No, they're not. Neither are libraries. Only when they do their like criteria and 50% off summer sale. it's like, oh, hell yeah, get to Barnes & Noble. Yeah, that's the only time anyone ever shops at Barnes & Noble is anymore is just in my

Criterion DVDs. Yeah, or Starbucks. Like, that's where the Starbucks is. Exactly. But anyway, their website is a trip. I don't know if you all looked at the tweet with the Action for Racial Justice banner on the union busting page. Yeah, somebody should have thought that through just a little bit more, I think.

You mean someone at ALA or someone at the law firm? The law firm definitely. The law firm definitely, but like I think you know, ALA you could have done some, could have done some thinking on that too. They could have done a little information literacy. Get your lateral reading glasses on librarians.

I'm looking at the picture of this lady and like, yeah. But also I mean like ALA does love busting unions basically because, I mean, it's shot down every attempt for it to be a labor organization in its entire fucking history. So, um, good job, buddies. Yeah, there's some pretty weak attempts at defense and the replies, which are like, no, the law firm has a union busting aspect to it. Like, it's not that, it doesn't matter that that's not the part that ALA is using. Exactly. Yeah. It's a problem that it exists

all together. It's, it's kind of like, um, Okay, so a few years ago, there was kind of a fracture in the temple of Satan movement, which is the Lucian Graves Satanic Temple. And because they were using a law firm that had offered their service as pro bono, but that law firm had also defended white supremacists like Richard Spencer and stuff. So, yeah, there was a lot of... displeasure with the Temple of Satan's ideas on that. Was it like an ACLU kind of vibe where it's like, well, we have. Exactly that. Yeah.

It's that First Amendment-y stuff. Like, oh, it's my free speech and your free speech. Good job with a hamptory. I didn't have the Temple of Satan on my library podcast bingo card. So thank you for that. It's a temple heavy episode. Yeah, exactly. Well, anyway, that's what's up.

You're wearing the plus-in-hift on the ALA. I really was going to skip it this week, and that just came up. This nugget, just they deliver consistently. Yeah. Lower your expectations. How low is this bar? It's a dressage bar and not a limbo bar, so it being low is a good thing. I don't actually know how horse riding works.

I just assume that Dressage is jumping over things. I thought that was like the boob window. That's D'Colage. Okay. That's the chest area. Boob window. Yeah. Well, now that we're off to a great start.

Let's throw back to the, through the prime age of decoletage, the 16th. Hell yeah. Actually, yeah. Honestly. It's, you know, it's hot out. There's no AC. So the origins of academic publishing go back to 1600s.

Usually the Royal Society is the starting point people talk about. It's mostly focused on dissemination. There's no peer review. It's only editorial review. And that kind of goes on for a while of just being like a society of letters for a few hundred years until after the Second World War. That's when you start seeing the growth of all these specialist journals, which are highly subsidized by the federal government. And so they're making more and more specialized journals that could never be maintained on their readership alone because their readership is like one bus of people. And if the bus crashes, that's the end of the journal.

With the decline of throwing money at everything post-50s and the rise of kind of neoliberal ideology, you have this subsequent inability to keep them going, and that's when they start getting bought up by all the large oligopoly publishers to buy up these tiny journals to get a monopoly on specialized works, which is not necessarily bad at this point because it still continues the dissemination

of highly specialized information that needs to happen. But you now have an oligopoly. Where that brings us to today is that now academic journals are privately held corporations, mostly all the major journal are, that are a giant expensive machine for granting tenure. Okay, hold on, though.

Can you say that word again? Oligopoly. I've never heard that said out loud. I like how that sounds. I mean, I don't. Isn't it amazing the first time you hear it said out loud? Like, I remember the first time I heard someone say it out loud, and it was also in reference to academic publishing.

And I was just like, God, that's a great fucking word. Like, yeah. It sounds like it should be a beautiful song, like, oh, like, oh, my oligopoly. I don't know how I was saying it in my head, but it was not that. Illicbly. Yeah, like that fucking... A gullibly. A glubly.

...war thing. Aluminium? Yeah. Ali Gopblebri. Great username on Twitter. It's no longer being used. But academic journals are, yeah, a big expensive machine for granting tenure. Publishing in top-tier journals is pretty much required.

for promotion and tenure. And some breaking discourse. Oh, wait, hold up. So some breaking discussion this week was basically about how all of these former teaching institutions want to become prestigious research institutions, which means you need more people publishing more stuff all the time in journals. And there's just not enough people who want a peer review and you're not really encouraged to peer review.

and there's tons of stories of sabotaging peer review and stealing the idea. Or just like, you know, that one lady who was like, I just turned down everything I read because, you know, it's competition. So like I'll peer review, but I just shoot everything down. Jesus, that's shitty. Yeah, like literally like livelihoods are on the line. Fuck you psychic vampire. Jeez. Yeah.

I would prefer the people who just refuse to do it because they're like, well, I don't get paid to do it. and I don't get tenure to do it. Well, like, here's an interesting question about that, that, like, I wanted to bring up later, but it's a good point now. Like, as part of my salary, part of that is I have to do, like, scholarship as well as service to the profession. So technically, am I being paid for that as just part of my expected job duties kind of thing? It's like, hmm, like, should I be being paid more if I do this kind of thing?

Or is that part of my salary? quote. But you're weighted so low on service. Yeah. And teaching, the thing that drives me nuts is that teaching and research are not equal at most universities, which is most of what you do is teaching. Well, it's not valued like in academia as a whole mechanism. Like a teaching institution, very rarely has like the credo of a research institution like the Carnegie classifications are you know in themselves inherently part of this problem yeah like smaller places will tend to actually have better courses and like professors than the big research institutions because those people weren't hired to teach they were hired to do research and then oops they have to like

teach a course once a semester anyway, damn. But then at the smaller institutions, it's no, you're there to be a professor and then also do your research, but you're not a research university, right? So you actually get a better experience as a student going to those. Yeah. Well, and also that back to the tenure discussion, they're at those institutions, there seem to be a lot less emphasis on, and I say this having worked at a teaching institution before going over to a research institution, that at least in like the culture of the school and the

tenure requirements, it's, it's your tenure requirements is more based on teaching and, you know, decreasingly less emphasized on your research output or your service to your profession. It's more about your service to the university and, you know, your teaching portfolio is actually very important at some of those institutions. And that's just from my own experience as a non-tenured faculty at a teaching university. Yeah, if you have a non-tenure situation, then you are mostly evaluated on your teaching. That's kind of a conversation that comes up a lot with open educational resources, is tenure is kind of a barrier to creating them and adopting them, because you need to spend all your time getting your research together for your tenure portfolio. So the

people who are doing the most innovative stuff in teaching are mostly non-tenure-track lecturers. Oh, absolutely. I think that's probably where a lot of that labor is happening is in those non-tenure-track lectures or maybe even adjunct on some level because there's, you know, an emphasis to have output that you can put on a CV as, because, you know, no one, who wants to say an adjunct forever unless that's like your part-time job in addition to a full-time job. But it's hard out there for all y'all pimps or not or people who have agency over their own bodies.

You can edit all of that out. Playing it backwards. Yeah, playing it backwards. One day I'll do that. Anytime Carrie says something she takes back immediately, just start playing it backwards. Yeah. I learned how to do that in audition. just one thing they teach you in the demo, which I don't know why.

So that you can listen to Zeppelin 4 backwards. Yeah. That's it. Only valid reason. Actually, it's actually Kiss. That's the one you're solicit. Because, yeah, you make out to Zeppelin 4. That's what it is.

Yeah, that's, I mean, I guess. I'm learning so much today. This is an educational podcast. This is why we should all get, like, teacher priority for vaccination. Exactly. Yeah, this is educational.

No, did you hear that? The, what was it? One of the, the Peloton lady got teacher vaccination status because she teaches. Squeeze me. What?

Yeah. Yeah, I don't remember. I heard about that. Yeah. Well, maybe it wasn't Peloton or whatever, but someone who's teaching like a cycling class. And they're like, I'm a teacher. That sounds like Peloton.

It's amazing. What a scam. I'm a cyclist. Like virtually anyways, and that's the whole point? Yeah. Yeah, there's not like a, it's not like a chain of studios or something. Maybe it was like Soul Cycle or something. Oh, you know what?

It was Soul Cycle. It was Soul Cycle, yeah. It's like an in-person cycling studio. Why do I know so much about the cycling world? I mean, you're a biker. I am a biker. Bike, yeah. I am an indoor cyclist.

I have a velodrome in my basement apartment. I really want to get like a very cheap like exercise bike for my living room for when I watch opera for like three hours in a row because it's like, oh, I can just like be on a bike while I do that. Yeah, you don't want to be on a bike for three hours. I'll tell you that much. I usually my sit bones are, you know, roaring at me after about 40 minutes usually. Like I watch, I've been watching the prisoner as I ride lately. nice and yeah like one episode of that is about as much as I can do with my um my rear end and I don't have the best seat on my bike right now but um anyway thanks for you're gonna finish that with uh I don't have the best rear end and I was going to be like okay well that's absolutely

a lie for anyone who's ever met me I have an ass that doesn't wait that is that is I'm just going to put it out there. Episode two, I have a great ass. You can visit Carrie's, yeah, you can visit Carrie's Twitter for all the documentation about her just yelling how great her ass is. I mean, I do do that sometimes when my self-esteem is low. We're the only podcast with an ass that don't quit. Yeah, exactly. come

for the materialist analysis stay for the asses that don't quit that should be an information literacy now let's talk about how you know

if an ass is good or not that's actually one of my personal frames in the Carrie Wade framework for information literacy asset detection yeah

anyway open access yeah I'd like to open your access. Yeah, baby. Sorry. I didn't mean to make this a horny podcast. I'm glad you did.

Probably if you can hear me drinking my cider and finding it very refreshing. Did we lose Justin? Justin. Where is podcast dad? Oh, no, Daddy. No wonder we wandered so far. We've gone astray, father. We now started making a horny podcast.

In the winds are coming in hard. Papa, it's so close. I've run out of soup, chips. Oh, dear Lord. Yeah, playing as a Victorian orphan happens to be one of my hobbies. Okay, there I am. There you are.

Papa, you pretend. I had no idea that it wasn't like, I thought, I'm not muted. And then I realized, like, it wasn't picking me up. And I got very confused. Could you hear us? Yeah, I could hear you. I'm very sorry. Yeah, I didn't drop out.

That's why I was so confused. So we had the, in open access, we had the coming death of academic journals, similar to like the death of print media. thought. It's kind of like in the 90s internet culture like the capitalist techno-utopianism like liberal communism of this era of this era

like you know if you're not familiar with liberal communism it's basically just the idea that like capitalism is going to make communist utopia in some way via technology. Yeah I read a really great article about this one time about this guy who lived in a bunker

in Belgium and he tried to create his own techno utopia in this Belgian bunker and they just got really fucking got goth and listened to synth music but like he was also really into technotopia capitalist

internet culture anyway there was a great term that came out of this called Bunkergyle which is someone who loves Bunkergile Because guile is the human word for horny Yeah I think it is

Horny for bunkers Yeah that's a super guile And that means it's cool Yeah that's it It's bunker horny Specifically So like a lot of this can be traced back to like Hockcheists

Like just making lots of bunkers all across Europe And just being like okay now it's have a raven them Yeah Like I mean that's I think that's where some Techno-utopianism comes from in part There was also this guy I watched a documentary made about him one time and it's called We Live in Public

which he recorded, it was like late 90s. He had one of the first streaming video sites but it was like a like a oh, Gen X News kind of vibe to it but yeah he like filmed himself living 24-7 and streamed it live in the 90s, and he was a real dick. Like, I, like, he was at this, like,

I went to the screening at a film festival, and he was there, and, like, there was some question about his girlfriend that he, like, filmed living with for his stream, and someone was like, don't you really love her? He's like, no, I never loved her. So, also. For, like, a yet another knockoff.

of blowup, right? That sounds like, you all know that film, right? No, but we've got to do a movie episode. Yeah, the Antonioni one where it's like, oh, he takes a picture and then like sees a thing that happened in the background or like there's the murder in the background. Sorry to spoil it for you all. Yeah. The movie is, you know, 50 plus years old.

So if it hasn't been spoiled for you yet. It's got that great money shot of him like. Snape killed Dumbledore. I guess. Yeah. I don't know. Wasn't that the big spoiler? I don't remember.

Yes, it was. Well, the problem with all this techno-utopianism is that they never think about labor costs so many thing. And they just never think about, it never has a material critique, which is why people like Gijet call it liberal communism. Like, it's, we'll get all the good stuff of like, a, you know, luxury, gay-based communism. But we're not going to have to ever think about, like, how we distribute labor or how we

extract materials. or, you know, we're just going to fix it. We're just, we're going to tinker with it until it's fixed. And then it'll be fixed and then we'll be happy. Yeah. And I think we still have a lot of that happening with, you know, the cult of personality around like Elon Musk or Bezos pledging all of his money to like space exploration and stuff.

So. Yeah, it's an exact outcome of that. And also a lot of like modern American libertarianism is also. Yeah. And I've always, I've always thought that like, kind of our modern robber barons, as they are, are kind of a descendant of that 90s techno-utopianism, where there's also just like an inherent cynicism in it too that's like, you know,

I think there's an inherent cynicism to it too, which leans to some of that shittiness. There's actually a really great philosophy tube episode about this concept. And one of the things she talks about in it is how a lot of the things about like the sort of like technotopia, liberal communism thing, is that it also tries to remove itself from any accountability of when bad things happen. And the example she uses is like a Pontius pilot being like the head of the like being

the person who like, you know, as like a Steve Jobs, Amazon kind of figure. And look at all the great stuff we're doing. Oh, you know, that person, you know, ignore that kind of thing. But like, oh, look at all the great amazing things that were bringing you. Ignore the dead person in the corner kind of thing. It was a really cool example. It was a really good episode. Yeah.

Yeah. The reason this didn't happen is because, as we mentioned with all these specialist journals, they, every article is, articles aren't fungible goods. It's like every article is its own monopoly because it's copyrighted. You can't exchange one article for another. And there's just no transferability of them. And so the major journals are, we're saying like, well, all we have to do is set up a proper login and like we're just going to run exactly the way we always have. And when people kept demanding open access, they said, well, who's going to do all the work if you have all these, you know, if you just post your papers online. Of course, you know, now there's plenty of research that shows like how much value added does a journal actually give, which is not as much as you would think, but still like a significant amount.

But we'll get to like future solutions at the very end if we ever make it there without talking about like butts, which, you know, if we get to an hour and all we've explored is like human anatomy, I think that's a win. So we there was a move towards using article processing charges instead of like, well, we're just going to keep this capitalist model. and we're going to shift to article processing charges. This is not exactly a perfect timeline, but this is kind of, I'm trying to get us to where we are now. And it's a concept that's more common in like fine arts books. So if you have like page charges or you have like,

um, subvention funds in universities sometimes. So that's actually not entirely new idea, but it's very new for, you know, working out the model. And of course, this is where we get to the fear of pay to play journals.

Is every journal, of Vanity Journal, which was something I read this week. Is that what everything is now? And this creates the fear of predatory journals, which are usually scams that pretend to be a new open access journal that will then ask for an APC and they won't do any peer review and they're not really legitimate, although there's tons of room to question what is legitimacy in an academic article.

But usually the barrier is no peer review is really done. and also very sketchy things like if you withdraw it you have to pay us a processing charge anyway which as far as I know as far as I know there's no legitimate article like journals that do that and even if they did don't pay it because like where they can do it so this is where we get to Jeffrey Beale and his problematic list that was very you know anglo-centric but all of anglo-publishing is and of course they came with a lot of the problems in nationalism we talked about fear of India, fear of China, fear of Iran, fear of the

basically Latin America as well, although Latin America has come up with some pretty good solutions for open access publishing. And there's a different acceptance rates by different disciplines of open access. Some got pretty quick into it, like astrophysics. And some are

slower in sciences. I would think like chemistry, I think is particularly slow one. Computer science went along pretty fast. And the humanities can be a lot less accepting because rarely you have no fund, rarely do have funding that would pay for these article processing charges. And also things like history, you know, there was a push I remember by the American Historical Association in the last decade of, you know, less monographs, more journal articles.

And I kind of wonder if there's not going to be a cultural backlash to that, which is we don't need to move to the journal model. Like we're fine still making monographs. And I think actually, the more I've been thinking about this in the past week or so, the more I think, yeah, the humanities probably shouldn't be adopting a science-based dissemination project of moving towards journal articles. Because, again, that creates so much overhead and so many journals you have to buy. But I think also on the other hand of that, with the kind of falling apart of university presses to publish a lot of those

humanities and history-oriented manuscripts, that might be influencing some of that push to academic journals as well, or does it? I really can't tell. I feel like when the AHA was pushing for it, it was really about we need more bite-sized, focused research. We don't need everyone trying to make a grand synthesis every five years in a special subfield. And we need to make a more opportunities for shorter publishing that would allow graduate students to really focus on small projects that will really get into the primary sources and make better research, which, you know, I totally understand that. I just really don't think trying to write like

biology is going to do that. Right. Have you like read a biology paper? It's very just like, this is exactly what you did. Here's the outcomes. Here's our methods. Boom. Yeah, I read them a lot. Right. I'm a, yeah, I am a, I have, so I have an English degree, but I became a science queen, which is a fun journey for me. But anyway, yeah, I read a lot of, and I don't know that that necessarily means the format has to be the same way that scientific literature is conducted, because I don't think that's, I don't think that's a useful framework for looking through it, like how the article is written.

I mean, like the style of it, like a humanity is like, let's, talk about, you know, the whatever's of this book in like a very theoretical, philosophical way versus here's what we did, here's what came out of it. Not that that doesn't take the same amount of like intellectual rigor. Yeah, it totally does. Yeah. It's just a different method of thinking. Right. Yeah. Okay. Can we pause for just a second? Because like, y'all are really really into this and I'm like an open access baby. So can I can I just like recap what I, what I think is like what open access is real quick. Yeah.

Yeah, I'd love to hear this. Yes. Okay, okay. So I've been kind of like doing some reading and I got through like 20 pages of a book, but it's neither here nor there. So it's basically the people who are doing the research are saying we want the research to be available for free to pretty much anybody, but particularly other researchers, right? Mm-hmm.

That's the main idea. That's the main idea. And they are pretty much, you pretty much the whole thing that's in the way is just the major, or the like conventional publishing model, right? Like you don't like, except for like what Jay said where like it's part of like your job description, but you're not getting paid to like write or submit these articles. And the APC is literally you paying a publisher to publish it and put it through that process. Is that what?

Okay. Yep. Okay. And so the researchers are paying the publishers to submit their articles so they can be open access, but otherwise they wouldn't be getting paid at all. So there's like no net gain there. But then on the other side, the readers are then paying the publisher to read these articles if they're not open access. And I just wondering how it got to a place where it just seems like the only person who gets any good out of it. this besides like the tenure thing is is the publishers is is that wrong no ding ding yeah do we have a soundboard for that like uh like like like like all of the labor all of the labor is just is is everybody but the publishers like the publishers are the ones who are making the money they're essentials yeah i think you nailed it okay okay just making sure this is why alphabir so evil by the way They're like, oh good Lord.

Oh, oh, yeah. Like, and I've picked a little bit of this up kind of just osmosis, just being friends with Justin alone. Oh, yeah. But I just wanted to be like, uh, I, I am understanding this correctly from a non-academic point of view, right? Because it just seems, it seems, it just seems like it shouldn't have happened. Like, this can't be the way it is, right? But no, it is apparently exactly as bad as I, as I, okay. I just love to say it really is that fucking dumb.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's why we had to kind of go back to the beginning of like, we created more and more specialist journals that could not rely on their own readership. So they had to become bundled. And that was what we called like the, and not only just bundled into these, these oligopolis publishers,

but then we had so many of these things that we then had to create what was called the big deal, which is the big subscription packages. Now those have, you know, return, like lower return on investment, whether that's because of the growth of open access or because they're just bad value for money. And it's not really clear which way that actually is. You know what this reminds me of, though? Cable TV. It seems like it's kind of the same exact thing. Like, telco is just they don't want to, cable TV is dying and they don't want it to die because it's their biggest moneymaker. So they're fucking everybody over left and right outside. But, you know,

Is that kind of a good analogy, you think? Well, kind of no, because academic publishers are making way more bank than cable companies. So cable companies actually destroy their own business models, whereas academic publishers seem to be able to just integrate them in different ways, like as long as they still are kind of in control of. See, this is what we were talking about with like the Scarley Kitchen people last week, which is when all of their arguments, because of the. they're all about tinkering and they're like, these radical centrists and they're like, we're trying to fix these issues by, you know,

because we're very smart people, we know you can't just get rid of the publisher. But the, when you listen to them long enough, you realize the only sensible solution is just to nationalize those companies to solve the problems. But they're too much of cowards to say it. But like that is what their argument would be is,

well, we can't get rid of these structures. Like, okay, well, then the simplest answer, which is to be to nationalize them. but they won't take that step. Once again, capitalism. Yeah. And so there's also the worst of both worlds, which is hybrid journals. I want to mention briefly.

So those are traditional subscription journals, but if you, as an individual, would like to make your individual article open access, you can do that. You can pay the article processing charge. It's normally way more expensive for a hybrid journal, by the way, than a pure open access journal. so then your library is buying that whole subscription but your article also was paid to be open access

so your institution in some way or you as a person is part of that institution has paid for it twice so it's even worse it's it's consumer choice right like you it's the same way where like you spend more money for greenwashed products i guess yeah that's like the charter schools of um of publishing i think It's, you know, I mean, and APCs make sense for fully open journals, at least a little bit. For a hybrid journal, it makes absolutely no sense. And that's why they're not considered compliant under like Plan S, which we might just skip Plan S. But I think Plan S could be its own thing. So I just mentioned the big deals, which is basically no one had enough money to subscribe to everything.

So this is a problem in the 90s. It was called the Serials Crisis. It's not really referred to as that anymore. But there were a lot of people who said... I still hear people saying it, so... Yeah, I just hear it really infrequently. I just... I'm never sure if this is like an out-of-time phrase or what, but the big deals were essentially to make sure that you could get access to all the major research.

What we're looking at now, because of the rise of open access, are these bigger deals or these transformative agreements where you're going to pay even more money, for a even bigger deal, and you're going to have the subscription access, and your institution won't have to pay article processing charges, which, again, if you just had all that money and we're running it out of a university press or university-run journals or government-funded journals, that would be a lot more sensible. I guess this is where Plan S has to fit in. So Plan S is a coalition of funders where it's more focused in the EU, but there are a lot of American

organizations that are signed on to it. And they require journals to be compliant with various changes, which are supposed to go into effect this year. So all the authors should retain their copyright or the institution, again, depending on if your institution claims copyright, immediate no embargo self-archiving of the final version, or an OA journal, which, of course, if you're going to have an OA,

if you're going to have an open access self-archived, version, you might as well just flip your whole journal, which is kind of what they want. Hybrid journals are unacceptable. I'm not even going to touch mirror journals. And there's also a way for Humanities books and chapters, but it doesn't really seem to be a top priority right now because they're trying to get the rest of it going. And there was a recent response of pretty much every major publisher saying, we can't support the rights retention part of this. We're happy with the article processing charges part where you pay us money to publish. But we don't want faculty who write for us for free to retain their copyright because reasons.

I didn't read the whole thing because I didn't care because I mean, I don't spell the bullshit. I don't care what their argument is. But this is a major power shift. And I was explaining this because I gave a presentation this week to my faculty members of my institution about how this is a major power shift away from journals to funders. And you could say, well, it's their money. They can say how they want to spend it. But this is a really intense power struggle. and it's not clear that authors are going to come out any better on the other end.

You would think it's being done in their name, but it's really kind of being done in the name of the public. These things are just supposed to be open access, and that's a good thing. And to do that, well, you're basically going to have to be funded by one of us. So now every journal in the world is going to be article processing charge funded. And if you're not getting funding from a plan S funder, they've transformed all of these journals. and now if you don't have the money for an APC charge,

you can't participate anymore, which is a big problem, especially if you come from a country that doesn't have the same wealth as a lot of the Anglophone countries. So it creates, it's not clear that this is going to be any better for anyone else, and it's not clear that this power struggle, moving power to like the Gates Foundation is a better idea than Elsevier having all the power. They're both probably equally evil institutions.

And as I mentioned earlier with a lot of, lot of the ability of publishers to take on new business models. There's also a lot of acquisitions going on. So, you know, B Press, which is an institutional repository software for, for articles, to, you know, preprints and postprints to be archived. That was bought by Elsevere. Social Science Research Network was bought by Elsevier. You mentioned last week, Kandawi, which is an open access imprint, was bought by Wiley. Again, this reminds me of cable, or of, of telco's just like Comcast bought this and Verizon bought this and now there's only two places you can get your internet and cable TV from in the entire country.

Yeah, that is more apt because then eventually you're losing, it's the same like barriers to entry problem. If you make all of the traditional publishers flip to open access on the plan S model, if you want to start a new journal and get in on that, there's a lot more barriers to entry into the market than they used to be. So it's kind of like, oh, we're going to regulate Facebook, but now it's hard for whatever the next social media company is to actually come into the market. So we talked, actually Carrie sent a article by Charlotte Rowe about bias in scholarly communication generally. But this really comes up a lot in open access because, again, of all the predatory publishing boogeymen of fear of Asian in particular,

Asian in South Asian journals. And so the article we were sent was systemic barriers and allyship and library publishing, a case study reminder that no one is safe from racism. So this was basically a journal out of the University of Pittsburgh that was focused on central Asian countries. And they were submitting it to Scopus. So Scopus is an index, which is on by Elsevier. And you basically want to be indexed. I feel like we need an Elsevier sound for the soundboard.

Yeah, I'll come up with more. We were talking about the journal article and how the... Yeah, the journal was being sent to scopus for indexing. It's a journal of Central Asian Global Health, I believe. Right. And so this was a university-affiliated journal, and the review they got back was just like someone who did not look into it, clearly. It was like, it's not clear that it's affiliated with the university. It seems to be saying

more about the authors, which was just a weird racist jab that I read that paragraph like three or four times. And I was like, I don't understand what that person is trying to say. It said the website was crap, which actually, you know what, that's almost fair because I've, I help maintain some open access journals. And there are faculty members who refuse to make the basics of the open Access Journal presentable. So, and I'm just being looking nice. I mean, like, you need to list where your editorial board is on your website. You can't just not do that.

There's some standards you have to do. I know you're not trying to get into Scopus, but like, you've got to do some. There's a checklist. I try to get them through. But it's, this happens all the time, of course, to journals that are not in the United States. Europe. Basically, this happens. And there's an example of a Cape Town South Africa journal being refused from Scopus. And Scopus, apparently, according to this article, doesn't review a journal

a second time, although I recently was in a conversation with someone who was resubmitting a second time. So maybe that's changed recently. Maybe there is kind of an appeals process. But I doubt that goes on forever. I think eventually they'll probably lock you out. But that's just speculation on my part. Speculation. That's just my libel button. The point of the article was basically to say

what can we demand of companies like Scopus because we do pay them an awful lot of money and we should, in theory, have a little bit of control over some of their policies. But getting libraries to do anything collectively is really tough. I think that'll be a recurring theme on this

podcast of again, these are things that just have to happen. consortia levels and they just have to happen at a big organizational level and it's not going to be a la so it's going to have to be it's going to have to come from somewhere but somebody's going to have to do it yeah and i think the big part the part that gives me the most hope is just kind of coming up with deal breakers in contracts and be like you've got to start dealing with this or we're we are all agreed that we're not going to sign this contract with you next year and if you can get a big enough group of people to say that, whether or not it's a formal consortia or not.

So, like, Texas right now is preparing to renegotiate with Elsevier. It's not just because Texas has, like, five university systems because Texas, and they all compete with each other. But they're all coming together for this one big negotiating, which has never happened before, which will make us bigger than the UC system. Yeah, that's a huge, and that's a huge number. Yeah, it's a gigantic number. They're all pissed off about the same thing.

basically. And they've never worked together before. So it doesn't have to be a formal consortia that you're stuck with forever. You just need to get enough people to say, look, here's what we want. And if you don't give it to us, we're not going to sign this contract. So that gives me some hope about how to address inequality. And a lot of these, this is about scholarly publishing more generally. But again, it comes up a lot in open access where open access journals of a certain type are just given more scrutiny. And I think a lot of that goes back to Jeffrey appeals list and I think it's reinforced by all of the fears that are constantly stoked by legacy publishers of well you know people are trying to get access to your credentials and that means they

could get other IP and it's like well maybe your university shouldn't be developing freaking biological weapons and then they wouldn't be able to steal that information from you. That's how they write about it. They're like well yeah they're getting access to articles now but what about your research projects? Like, well, what are you doing? It's creepy. So there's some future ideas about what open access could look like. One that's been, I think is pretty implausible, but it makes a lot of sense, which is like

a supercontinent of publishing, which is basically one big repository system, probably decentralized, ideally decentralized. And everything would be an overlay journal. An overlay journal is a journal on top of a repository. So everyone would just submit their papers to it. And then a journal would go, oh, I like that. We're going to take that for peer review. And then, but the articles would be open from the very beginning.

And then there would be public peer review. And then it would be, you know, vetted. And then it would go and it would basically just get the branding of the journal added and say, okay, this is in our issue for this year. That makes a whole lot of sense. And you could do it in a way that's decentralized. But I really doubt that that's how it would turn out. I think it would just turn into a monopoly.

Yes. Oh, I was going to say supercontinent just made me think like an actual physical continent of like papers. Paper Pangia. Yeah, paper Pangia. You could call the software Pangia. Like, it's already, the name's already there. It does itself. Paperback writer, paper pangea.

I'm going to turn every time one of these things. I'm going to turn every one of those into like a song. This is just going to become a drop every time. That's the, what, third or fourth time someone's sung on this episode? It's fun. If you want to be good, Carrie can do it. But it'll be me. It'll just be like, p p p p pangia.

Actually, that might be better. Yeah, I love making things bad on purpose, like just bad memes and stuff. It's funnier. We can practice our harmonies later. Mm-hmm. Honestly, there's not that much bad. lag, we could pull it off. So I was thinking about, I was listening to another podcast about comedy today.

And what they were talking about was how all of these comics who are performing during COVID are, you know, being seen as like the, you know, they're the real heads. But of course, they're also kind of dumb. And like, you're getting like a bad crowd and everything. And there are plenty of people in comedy who, are like no and it's like causing rips within the community. Was this why you mad? Because I think I just listened to that episode.

Yeah, I think it was why you mad. And they were talking about how when COVID is over, is it just going to be an ongoing culture war? You became a robot, Justin. Is that just me? I think it's just you because he sounded fine to me. Yeah, he sounded fine to me. Oh, thank God.

I'm like constantly watching the wire and the bunnies to see like if they do the one chomp one kill because they can do it. See, I thought when you said I'm watching the wire, I was like, oh, I've been meaning to watch that. I thought the same thing. I was like, oh, I need to get back into it after I finish the prisoner. I need to finish this podcast. Great joke, dad. Oh, man, I didn't want to be podcast, dad.

I wanted to be the one who interrupts, but I have to also kick some. now make this thing work. But is there going to be like a culture warrant I get in publishing after the plan S dust settles? It's something I was thinking about because are people just going to be so locked out that and plan S says they're not really going to use impact factors anymore, which is a measure of how often articles in a journal excited doesn't really mean a whole much, a whole bunch, but it's it's still very powerful metric that is used to rank journals for a lot of different fields. Yeah, I have to deal with that stuff a lot. I think you're right, to some extent. I will say that I think especially in fields where there's not a ton of government funding for

research, that will definitely be the case because it will be only people who can afford to publish will publish. One nice thing is that there is an open access mandate that started with the National Institutes of Health and became kind of a, it was passed by Congress and put into law in 2013 that any certain founding, funding organizations through U.S. government, if you receive funding to do your research, you'd have to publish it green open access and a freely available repository. So, you know, I think like the sciences are pretty safe from having to be part of that cultural war, but I think you'll see it more harshly felt in like some of the social sciences and humanities.

And also in countries where the government is not trying to pump. Yeah, where there's not that incentive where like all of Europe has an open access mandate and there's some other countries and federations. But if you don't have a country culture calling for that to demarc, essentially democratize your scientific research that's being done, you know. I think you will see some lag. Yeah. And countries like China or like Mexico where they're just like, if you get into this big

Western journal, we're going to give you like a cash stipend. And there are going to be countries that are just not going to do that as part of their national agenda. And so what are those countries going to do? Are they going to make overlay journals? Are they going to create their own independent journals and say, you know what? Like not just a culture war within like the Anglophone sphere, although I think that could happen too.

but really just people who are going well everything's apc based now we're just not going to the only way yeah i think you'll see a global split too between like you know like the um kind of highly developed world for lack of a better term and the kind of like more emerging uh countries and you know india's all kinds of crazy political stuff's going on in india right now my gosh yeah it's like this last year for india has and really, well, I think the last two or three years, like it's all under the Modi regime. It's been really intense. Yeah. And so one of their things right now started with a discussion about banning SciHub in the country,

which was, I guess, pushed by the major legacy publishers. But one of the responses to that was, well, why don't we just have a national subscription to all of the journals? So like every single citizen can access science direct. Yeah. Yeah. It was called, it's called one country, one subscription. description or something.

Yeah. And it's like, yeah, why why not do that? That's actually presentable. Yeah, I think like, uh, Netherlands has done something like that too. And I mean, like, obviously they were willing to work with the Netherlands, but less so. I think it's, they're more reticent to offer that to, um, you know, countries in the, uh, the east. So non-European, non-anglo countries are, uh, non-European non, uh, I, sorry, just.

like forget that I'm speaking right now. Playing it backwards. Yeah, I guess that's we're at an hour and I think we covered pretty much everything I wanted to cover. For our ending on a good note, I was going to originally say, I'm not working today, which is

a thing in libraries that's making me really happy or the days I'm not working. But a really cool thing that happened was I started a podcast and everyone was really nice about it. You've done a lot of, you made a Twitter and everything and I didn't even realize it at first. So thank you for doing all of that, Justin. Yeah, I've had like my non-library friends and acquaintances be like,

oh, I'm going to, you're on a podcast now. I have to listen to it and check it out. And I'm like, oh, okay, you're not going to understand anything. I mean, you might understand that there are things that are really fucked that you don't really fully understand. My wife was like, I'll listen to it, but when I feel better so I can actually maybe follow it. She had a migraine, but it was just really funny because she's like, I want to listen to it. I swear. Yeah, no, my boyfriend, like, subscribe to it on whatever thing he uses and downloaded the first episode.

And I was like, that's sweet. But you're not going to know anything, but that's sweet. I like the gesture. It's the thought that counts. He probably will listen to it, too. You are the podcaster boyfriend now. I am. Oh, no. He even listens to Chapo.

Yeah. I don't know. Do I have to get like turned into a douchebag now? I think you just need like a hoodie that you always wear. Yeah, yeah. You're going to have a hoodie. Yeah. And then just have a really hot boyfriend that you can be, you can stand next to. And everyone goes, ah, there it is. The podcaster boyfriend with his, with his hotter boyfriend. I'm wearing a hoodie that I wear like every single day so I feel I feel attacked I came out here to have a good time and I'm feeling attacked right now sorry I own one hoodie yeah I own Anne no I don't even own a hoodie I have my boyfriend's hoodie mine is first that's even better yeah it's like I don't look like the podcast boyfriend he does does, but I am.

That's the sly part of it. It's like, guess who the podcast. Yeah, guess who the podcast boyfriend is in this couple. Oh. Are you the podcast boyfriend or the non-podcast boyfriend? Like, no, I'm the BF version of the hot goth GF, right? Oh, yeah. Hot Goughbf, right?

For sure. Yeah. I'm the goth BF, right. That's the both worlds. Did anyone else want to do their ending on a good note? Or is that too much to ask for a good thing once a week? I think that's pretty steep this week. Yeah.

For me. I don't know. I got a lot of good things done at work, which was nice. And I watched some good movies. And that was nice. Yeah, the gentleman caller and I have been doing a whole like blow up cinematic universe where we watched the Antonio film blow up. And then all the other new Hollywood directors are like, is for me.

And so then you got Copeland. making the conversation and then De Palma making blow out. So we've spent the past couple of weeks, like, getting through those. And that was really nice because I hadn't seen. I love the conversation. It's so good, right? John Cazal is like, he only made like, he was only in like three films and each, like he was nominated for an Oscar and all of them.

Good. Like the Deer Hunter, the conversation and the Godfather, I think are the films that John Cazal is in. I like became minorly obsessed with John Cazal a few years ago. Is that the one where, yeah, he's in Dog Day Afternoon as well. Yes. Which fucking Whips. That's a great movie. Yes.

Yeah. It's like of the three of those films that I had seen, mine is blowout, which if you haven't seen, is the brand of Palma film with John Travolta, where he's a Foley artist. and he's out recording sound and then there's like a political like governor running for president in a car and has a blowout and he crashes into the pond and dies kind of thing

and he's like but I thought I heard a gunshot or whatever so it's like that kind of it's really good so John Lithgow's in it as well oh love John Lithgow he plays the bad guy it's great oh he's such a good villain he's so good at it he's such a good villain

man if you're a sound nerd and it's a great film I am yeah I'm gonna stop recording so that you can like talk about this and

okay can I just can I just say that can we make that our tagline like library pump library punk and fucking whips yeah

make that a soundbite of Jay saying that it fucking whips it's fucking whips I have so many sound bites to make after this good So we have a Twitter.

It's at Library Punk, not Library Pump. That's a different project that we're going to start. It's a library podcast porno, weirdly enough. Yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah, I didn't know. Welcome to Library Pump. We're just Tara, Library Pump.

We're just talking about big stuff. Just take my flub and run with it. guys. Changing the name of the group chat. Yeah. We're now library pump. The only, the horniest library. That reminded me my friend sent me the funniest thing where the porn was like,

what if the porn title of Rear Window was just Rear Window? Oh, no. And I'm like, brilliant. Or boob window. I was going to say, what's the day? Nicoletage for the button. And now we've come full social. I believe that is plumbers crack or dealing crack.

We need someone who's French. The dude at the magic convention where he like, you know, kneels next to all of them. Oh, huh. Oh, yeah. That dude was a hero. I can't believe they're being. King. Okay.

And if you want to send it, if you're not on Twitter, you can also send us like questions or whatever if we want to do. question and answer at library punk at gmail.com. Oh, we're doing Q&As now? We got a mailbag? I don't know. But if someone has a question, like, yeah, why not? So anyway, good night.