I am essentially a government librarian, these days a fairly rare breed although I don't think we're on the path to extinction quite yet. It was a path I chose(ish) early on in my career when I saw it as a way to combine my love of politics with my chosen career. To be clear at the time, when I was looking for my first professional post, being picky wasn't really an option (is it for anyone?!); I took the first job offer I got. It happened to be in the Civil Service and that's where I have stayed, and for the most part it's worked out for me.
What is odd about being a govt/CS/Special Librarian is that a lot of the debates and issues around Open Access have passed the sector by. It makes some sense, government libraries operate to provide a service to their department or subsection within. Researchers within will either be producing documents that can't be released for security reasons, or are released under an Open Government License on gov.uk, e.g. Home Office Research series and DfE research. They don't tend to publish in peer reviewed journals, and there aren't the same pressures to do so.
The cost of access to research undoubtedly affects us I think far more than it does most universities. The value of access to literature isn't necessarily seen by those who hold the purse strings, especially when -as they see it- so much is now free online and they have far more compelling budget pressures. This can create contradictions - "you must know about new advances in your field and we're going to hold you account if you don't, but also, we're not going to provide you with any resources to do that". And so where there are libraries they try to provide the access they can with shrinking budgets. Open Access can augment this in theory, but it can also provide challenges.
Take the fairly recent Cambridge Journal of Evidence Based Policing. It is a Gold Open Select journal, meaning you can chose whether or not to pay the APC and make your article Open Access. It currently has 31 article, 22 of which are Open Access, but actually there are only 3 articles behind a paywall not including book reviews. So, dilemma, do you subscribe to that journal? It's still going to cost a lot of your small budget, and maybe all future articles will be OA, but you have no way of knowing that. Now i'll grant you this could also be a dilemma for a university but I would argue back a) different budgets and b) niche comparative collection development requirements. Gold Open select really is the worst version of OA for everyone but the publishers.
Beyond collection development though, I would say the challenge is staying up to date with what the hell is going on. Perhaps your response to this would be, why do you need to keep up, and also, hello, it's difficult for all of us!?
I would retort that on the first point that we serve a similar function, and provide access to similar resources, but for the purposes of informing policy and professional practice. We might commission university research and provide funding for it, so knowing that most funding in now contingent on Open Access is something we should know but might not. It is still entirely possible to fund research and have it put behind a paywall we cannot afford to provide access to, because it's one article in a journal we have no other need to subscribe to. And the research commissioned will have been commissioned because the government wants answers to a policy relevant question, and wants practitioners to have access to the best available evidence, so to not then have access to some or any of the end products is ludicrous. This happens because there is a knowledge gap so yes it is important for Librarians and researchers in government to know what's going on with OA.
And the hello, it's difficult for all of us? I wouldn't dispute that, but it's clear to me if your not somewhere where such things are being regularly discussed its a real effort to get home and read about developments you've seen streaming through all day on Twitter. I know vaguely what Plan S is, but not really why it's seemingly so controversial. I know repositories aren't well indexed in Google Scholar and that I can have better look scouring repositories, but i'm not 100% clear why.
I went on a CILIP UKeIG training course in 2017 and I didn't really come away any more enlightened, it was too much of a basic overview. So I shall persist with Twitter.
Next blog I will attempt to go back to the more referenced evidence format - got to publish something or i'll never publish anything, if you see what I mean. Procrastinators unite!
What is odd about being a govt/CS/Special Librarian is that a lot of the debates and issues around Open Access have passed the sector by. It makes some sense, government libraries operate to provide a service to their department or subsection within. Researchers within will either be producing documents that can't be released for security reasons, or are released under an Open Government License on gov.uk, e.g. Home Office Research series and DfE research. They don't tend to publish in peer reviewed journals, and there aren't the same pressures to do so.
The cost of access to research undoubtedly affects us I think far more than it does most universities. The value of access to literature isn't necessarily seen by those who hold the purse strings, especially when -as they see it- so much is now free online and they have far more compelling budget pressures. This can create contradictions - "you must know about new advances in your field and we're going to hold you account if you don't, but also, we're not going to provide you with any resources to do that". And so where there are libraries they try to provide the access they can with shrinking budgets. Open Access can augment this in theory, but it can also provide challenges.
Take the fairly recent Cambridge Journal of Evidence Based Policing. It is a Gold Open Select journal, meaning you can chose whether or not to pay the APC and make your article Open Access. It currently has 31 article, 22 of which are Open Access, but actually there are only 3 articles behind a paywall not including book reviews. So, dilemma, do you subscribe to that journal? It's still going to cost a lot of your small budget, and maybe all future articles will be OA, but you have no way of knowing that. Now i'll grant you this could also be a dilemma for a university but I would argue back a) different budgets and b) niche comparative collection development requirements. Gold Open select really is the worst version of OA for everyone but the publishers.
Beyond collection development though, I would say the challenge is staying up to date with what the hell is going on. Perhaps your response to this would be, why do you need to keep up, and also, hello, it's difficult for all of us!?
I would retort that on the first point that we serve a similar function, and provide access to similar resources, but for the purposes of informing policy and professional practice. We might commission university research and provide funding for it, so knowing that most funding in now contingent on Open Access is something we should know but might not. It is still entirely possible to fund research and have it put behind a paywall we cannot afford to provide access to, because it's one article in a journal we have no other need to subscribe to. And the research commissioned will have been commissioned because the government wants answers to a policy relevant question, and wants practitioners to have access to the best available evidence, so to not then have access to some or any of the end products is ludicrous. This happens because there is a knowledge gap so yes it is important for Librarians and researchers in government to know what's going on with OA.
And the hello, it's difficult for all of us? I wouldn't dispute that, but it's clear to me if your not somewhere where such things are being regularly discussed its a real effort to get home and read about developments you've seen streaming through all day on Twitter. I know vaguely what Plan S is, but not really why it's seemingly so controversial. I know repositories aren't well indexed in Google Scholar and that I can have better look scouring repositories, but i'm not 100% clear why.
I went on a CILIP UKeIG training course in 2017 and I didn't really come away any more enlightened, it was too much of a basic overview. So I shall persist with Twitter.
Next blog I will attempt to go back to the more referenced evidence format - got to publish something or i'll never publish anything, if you see what I mean. Procrastinators unite!
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