http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/869-.html

While the worldwide researcher community is again busy working itself up into an indignant lather with yet another publisher boycott threat, I am still haunted by a “keystroke koan”:

—- “Why did 34,000 researchers sign a threat in 2000 to boycott their journals unless those journals agreed to provide open access to their articles – when the researchers themselves could provide open access (OA) to their own articles by self-archiving them on their own institutional websites?” —-

Not only has 100% OA been reachable through author self-archiving as of at least 1994, but over 90% of all refereed journals (published by 65% of all refereed journal publishers) have already given their explicit green light to some form of author self-archiving — with over 60% of all journals, including Elsevier’s — giving their authors the green light to self-archive their refereed final drafts (“postprint”) immediately upon acceptance for publication…

So why are researchers yet again boycotting instead of keystroking, with yet another dozen years of needlessly lost research access and impact already behind us?

We have met the enemy, Pogo, and it’s not Elsevier.

(And this is why keystroke mandates are necessary; just keying out boycott threats to publishers is not enough.)

If scholars fancy that a book such as _Arming America_ might help their students understand “bad scholarship” or might lead them to grasp something about the intensity with which Americans approach the question of guns in our country, I say, let them have at it. I am not opposed to people having access to the book. It is only when we classify and house such books in the usual way – arranged with an array of scholarly monographs on a like subject – that we run the risk of misleading or misdirecting our patrons. If a library wants to give titles such a _Arming America_ a special designated place that alerts readers about the book’s integrity (or to put it more accurately — lack of it), I say go for it. In answer to Mr. Blankenship’s question, I am all for that sort of compromise.

First off, for Mr. McKinzie… I wonder if you would consider a compromise that would seem to satisfy the principle of scholarly access to “damn lies” in a library’s collection. I can imagine a situation described by Mr. Anderson where a professor would want his students to have access to the Bellesiles book. Would it be a violation of your principle if you were to retain the “damn lies” books requested by a faculty member so that students could request them, yet keep those titles out of the general circulation/reference loop? This would seem to satisfy the pedagogical purpose of retaining “damn lies” books without exposing the uninitiated to its obfuscatory (is this even a word?) contents.

And secondly, for Mr. Anderson, my question for you is more of a question of principle than compromise. How famous/infamous does a “damn lies” book need to be before a library would consider retaining a copy for its collection? The Bellesiles book is some pretty low-hanging fruit to consider, but in an age of self-publication and ease of publication, where should the line of selectivity be drawn? Any time we are being selective, we could be accused of being the “truth police”. So which “damn lies” have enough “utility” to qualify them as worthy of retention in a library’s collection?

First, the assumption that a meretricious book can teach its readers only meretricious things. True it is that college students already know “what it is to cheat and to lie.” But what many of them don’t yet know, and need urgently to learn, is how to recognize particular types of cheating and lying, particularly those that come disguised in scholarly trappings. As I suggested in my SK posting, the Bellesiles book offers an excellent opportunity for a professor to expose such problems and encourage critical thinking about what constitutes honest scholarship. Obviously, such issues can be addressed in the absence of the book itself, but a real-world example gives the issues the weight of urgent reality. I think a racist book can be used to teach students about racism in ways that a book on the topic of racism can’t, and the same can be true of a book of dishonest pseudo-scholarship. Steve asserts that “students don’t need an example of sham scholarship to decipher”; I disagree, but more importantly, I think that’s something for their professor to decide, not for a librarian to decide preemptively on the professor’s behalf.

Second, the assumption that the purpose of book selection in the library is not only to ensure that good books are included, but also to exclude books that run a high risk of “misleading and deceiving” scholars. Obviously, here I disagree as well — not because I’m in favor of deception, but because I think trying to eliminate falsity (or even deliberate deception) from the collection is a sucker’s game. Any research library worth its salt will contain many books and journal articles that, to some degree, deliberately mislead with intentional falsehoods. (How many purely honest and truthful autobiographies are there?) To argue that the Bellesiles book must be excluded on these grounds is to argue that all deliberately deceptive content should be excluded. This would be impossible not only from a practical standpoint (who will read and evaluate the content of all the books in the collection?) but also from a philosophical one (which librarian’s understanding of truth will be the controlling version?). Now, I can imagine Steve responding along these lines: “Obviously, we can’t go through the whole collection and weed out all the lies. But that doesn’t mean we have to include a particular book like Arming America when we know that it’s fundamentally dishonest.”

This brings me to the third incorrect assumption under which I believe Steve is laboring: that an important purpose of the research library is to showcase fundamentally honest authors who perform good-faith scholarship, and to punish dishonest authors by denying them access to the audience we serve. This may sound paradoxical, but I don’t believe the library serves the purpose of truth by acting as the truth police. We serve truth by supporting scholarship, and scholars often need access to untruth, whether the untruth is wielded deliberately or not. Our controlling question, I believe, should not be “Was this book written in good faith?” but rather “Will access to this book support the scholarly work of my patrons?” In this particular case, it’s difficult to see how a research library could serve scholars studying the rhetoric of gun control in 20th-century America without providing access to the Bellesiles book – not in spite of its failings, but precisely because of them.

One last point: Steve misrepresents my position when he suggests that I advocate the deliberate collection of “fraudulent and misleading scholarship.” No: I advocate the deliberate collection of those resources that will be useful to the scholars we serve, and I maintain that the objective quality and even the honesty of those resources is a relevant but secondary factor. I am most certainly not saying that we should go out of our way to collect bad or meretricious books, only that the low quality or dishonesty of a book can’t be the controlling factor in the acquisition decision if our ultimate goal is to serve scholars. Offering our patrons a book like Arming America does indeed entail certain risks. But then, education is a risky business. There are no guarantees that students (or faculty) will use resources wisely or even responsibly, that they’ll understand what is being taught, that they’ll always recognize the differences between opinion and fact (or truth and lies), or even that they’ll use their education for good rather than evil. The important question is: faced with these risks, how should we respond? Steve seems to think that we should respond by protecting students from exposure to lies and deception. I think that approach probably makes sense in an elementary school library, but not in a research institution. I believe we should do what we can to help our patrons recognize and think critically about lies and deception – and I see no way to do that without exposing them to those things, and therefore accepting the risks that come with exposure to them.

We’ve also got a romantic idea about books and kids that doesn’t pan out. We want to think that every book we buy for them is going to be influential and a favourite. But we know that’s not true. They gravitate towards a few and the rest are garbage. Most children’s books are fodder, valuable only as one more that has contributed to their ability to read, building vocabulary, or learning content.

Only when tech is more kid-proof and we are less idealistic about the printed word will ebooks (or eliterature of some kind) be on the rise.