An Open and Shut Case

I was hunting around the office for an issue of Knowledge Quest from earlier this year that focused on visual literacy (find it if you can, it’s terrific) when I finally gave up and went online to locate it.

Except it wasn’t there. Published by the American Association of School Librarians (AASL), Knowledge Quest is available mainly in print. I found KQWeb, the magazine’s online component, which has some of the print issue but not the article I wanted.

It seemed strange that Knowledge Quest was mainly in print (and thus just for AASL members), so I started to poke around.

School Library Media Research, AASL’s peer-reviewed publication, is an open-access journal: online and freely available to all. But Children and Libraries, the refereed publication from the Association for Library Services to Children (ALSC), which bills itself as “a vehicle for continuing education of librarians working with children,” is available only in print. Same thing with the quarterly YALS, from the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA).

So if you’re a member of one youth division in the American Library Association (ALA), then you can’t read the literature from the other divisions, much of which might be highly relevant to your work. Unless, of course, you join the division; take out a subscription; get a friend to send it to you, like we did in the old days; or have access to the right subscription databases. I’m surprised ALA—which brought us $259 preconferences—hasn’t created a way for its members to buy articles from the other divisions, but it’s probably just a matter of time.

Go deeper and the situation gets more chaotic. Public Libraries is available online, but the last year is embargoed. It would seem that the Reference & Users Services Association’s RUSQ is open access. But College & Research Libraries, from the association of the same name, is the craziest of all: they release articles preprint, embargo the current two years, but make available older issues.

This is all, of course, very ironic. After all, librarians are the most vocal advocates for open access to journal content—except, apparently, when it’s their own publications. I suspect this is because of ALA’s outdated, carrot-on-the-end-of-the-stick, publishing model: keep the publications locked away as the supreme benefit of membership.

There are three problems with this approach, and one is ethical. Is it really right to harvest the intellectual capital of a profession—with no compensation for authors—then sell that content back to the profession? How can AASL, for example, whose membership has always been just a small percentage of the school librarians in this country, justify withholding Knowledge Quest from the rest of the educational community?

Another issue is marketing. Wouldn’t it be great if a literature student studying American Born Chinese (First Second, 2007) could get a link to Gene Yang’s 2007 Printz speech in YALS? Shouldn’t a journalist researching the impact of exposing kids to media easily find Bowie Kotrla’s “Sex and Violence” in last summer’s Children and Libraries? By locking away its literature, ALA loses out on a major marketing opportunity for its members, the divisions, the association, and the profession.

Finally, there is common sense. If you want your content to be used, then readers need to be able to discover it through a search engine and read it in a click. Or find it in their feed aggregator. We need to be able to forward it, post our disagreements with it, blog about it, and have it pushed to us on Facebook. It must, in short, be integrated into our professional lives. Or else it becomes irrelevant, no matter how good it might be.

Come on, ALA. Let your content go free. You’ll never miss your old-school business model again. I promise.

bkenney@reedbusiness.com