Page:Open access and the humanities - contexts, controversies and the future.pdf/59



Librarians’ oppositions to open access

Finally, there is a substantial movement within the library community that favours open access. After all, librarians bear the brunt of frustration when researchers cannot access material, an aspect potentially solved by OA. Where objections exist, the primary anxieties raised by librarians with regard to OA concern the future status of the library. If a library no longer owns a collection, then what is its function? What is the role of a librarian in this new world? The answer that has been circulating at most recent library conferences has been a suggested move from ‘collecting to connecting’104 – meaning that the library becomes a place that helps curate and ﬁnd material. In some senses this is a return of the subject librarian, with an additional fresh role in digital preservation and access via institutional repositories. Of course, it is unclear whether these aspects might also be subjected to disintermediation by commercial entities in the future; what is to say that Google might not feel itself better placed to take this role?

There is a contingent of librarians whose constituents remain sceptical, however. The foremost of these ﬁgures is Jeffrey Beall. Beall is most widely known for his curation of a list (‘Beall’s List’) that is designed to expose predatory open-access ‘publishers’. These predatory entities have disreputable review procedures and solicit material solely to collect article processing charges (thereby failing to ﬁlter material adequately for their supposed audience). While his curation of such a list is a valuable service, detractors feel that Beall should have done more to point out that the same is true of some types of ‘predatory’ publishers who work on the sale/subscription model, an aspect most clearly demonstrated by mass emails sent after conferences to solicit material for edited collections.105 This ﬁnally spilled over into a full-scale revision of Beall’s motivations when, in late 2013, he published an article that accused the OA movement of being an ‘anti-corporatist’, extreme-Leftist outﬁt ‘that wants to deny the freedom of the press to companies it disagrees with’, a radical opinion that separated Beall even from the usually conservative Scholarly Kitchen site (a popular weblog on scholarly communications known for its general scepticism towards the viability of open access).106 Beall’s article was not well received and sparked a series of