This year I’m getting the amazing opportunity to attend Electronic Resources & Libraries conference for FREE by being a volunteer. (For any library students looking for a way to attend local conferences at reduced rates, ask the organizers about volunteering—not only is it a great way to get access to a conference, you also get a lot of great networking opportunities by working at, for example, the registration/information desk and meeting and greeting presenters or vendors.)

I’m also doing a lot of tweeting about the conference and engaging in conversations. ER&L is very active about promoting discussions and live tweetings through resources such as TweetChat (I’m in the #erl13 room). A lot of people seemed energized and excited about my quotes and musings about the session on “The Social Economy of Open Access,” so here are some of the notes I took this afternoon:

The Social Economy of Open Access

• Social Economy
  • Exchange happens
    • Through the market (private sector, trade)
    • Through the hierarchy (public sector, redistribution)
    • Through social economy (community, reciprocity)
  • “A third sector in economies between the private sector and business or, the public sector and government. It includes organizations such as cooperatives, nonprofit organizations, and charities.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_economy)
  • Society tends to organize activities through the method of exchange that works the best
    • Technology can be disruptive to this
  • Social communities and economies are founded on reciprocity — both give & take
    • Gift exchange: obligation to reciprocate but uncertainty in the nature of the return gift
    • Knowledge gifts are awkward — if you give someone a gift of knowledge, they have to find a way to give it back to you constructively
  • Trust and reputation effects: benefits of continuous cooperation
  • Weaknesses in social economy
  • Potentially oppressive
  • Too much selfishness
• Social Economy and Open Access
  • Articles are donated — they represent a knowledge gift exchange
  • Peer Review
    • Community inclusion
    • Shared values
  • Subscriptions (market distribution)
    • It works, it creates the metrics by which we understand the relative value of a resource, how “scholarly” an article is and how much quality it has
    • Print & electronic journals
  • Open access (social distribution)
  • Open Access is a chess game between a market economy and a social economy
    • The social economy serves to maximize shareholder value
    • Social economy’s victory when market serves to enable universal access and use outside of the walled garden of scholarly institutions
    • Society will ultimately choose the better method of exchange
  • Peer Review is the heart of the scholarly publishing machine
  • Costs
    • Subscription costs vs authors paying to cover the cost of producing journal
      • Gold OA model
  • Legal mandates — President Obama’s new mandates to make government-funded research open & public after embargo period
  • Green vs Gold
    • Green represents more cooperative strategy
      • Peer review and transaction costs
      • Subscriptions aren’t falling and prices aren’t falling vs traditional journals
    • Gold represents a more competitive strategy
  • “The Three Pillars of the Social Economy” by Dr. Marguerite Mendell
  • Leadership
    • Crucial — people have to be talking and working with different models
  • Social enterprise
  • Favorable policy environment
  • Chantier de l’économie sociale
    • Cooperatives
    • Non-profits
    • Community Economic Development Organizations
    • Social movements
    • Wide arrange of social services and community programs/services all under a single heading
  • “The risk that the social economy may also add up to numerous fragmented initiatives at the margins”
    • Relevant insight to open access as so many different organizations/players/acronyms spring up and vie for success/resources
  • It’s hard to force a journal to lower its prices — too many people are invested in the availability of a resource, i.e. faculty wanting access to traditional journals reduces the ability of librarians to negotiate for lower prices or better deals with e.g. Elsevier
• What’s missing?
  • “Integrated Systemic Approach”
    • “Network of networks”
  • “Negotiating Capacity”
  • “Institutional Innovation”
• Recommendations
  • Unprecedented social coordination and innovation
    • Between faculty/users and librarians — serve their needs and desires while also working with and for them for change
      • Cater to their self interest and develop prestige
  • A new non-governmental organization
  • Take care of both green and gold OA models
    • Can libraries become the largest publishers of gold journals/articles?
  • Evolve libraries and librarianship to empower change by incorporating new models while serving users’ traditional wants
• Hybridize policies to address why OA is good and build bridges between new and old models
• Libraries are the most logical and efficient agency to manage and participate in global OA publishing models
  • Is publishing interchangeable with librarianship?
  • Are libraries really the most efficient institutions?
  • Librarians CAN offer strong skills in evaluation/review of articles