“Harvard Proposal to Publish Scholarly Research Free on the Internet.”

* My first tenure-track job was at a very small and very poor (as in impoverished– I thought it was a decent enough school, actually) public college/university called Southern Oregon U, and they had an extremely effective inter-library loan program. I don’t want to generalize too much from that one example, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t cheaper for most academic libraries to do this than to subscribe to various services. So it’s not a perfect system, but it’s not bad.

Alex, I think you’re right about librarians’ goals for OS stuff, and largely because of that, I have a feeling if some person wondered in to just about any university library in the U.S. and passionately asked for danah’s article, I be that librarian would help that person try to get it, even if they weren’t associated with that university.

* One solution– something danah might want to think about here– is to try to do everything but publish the article (an abstract, a link, a summary, etc., etc.) on a personal web site and say “hey, if you want a copy of this article, send me an email and I’ll hook you up.” Because I cannot believe that Sage or whoever is going to say it would be some violation to send interested readers a personal copy. Which leads me to my next point:

* I guess I might be tempted to test Sage’s willingness to enforce the letter of the law of their contract. I just have a hard time believing that Sage or anyone else is going to go after a writer like this, and I assume they would give you a “cease and desist” kind of notice. It’d be bad PR for them and good PR for the writer.

Of course, I say that without actually having done it myself. I didn’t put my abandoned textbook project up online until after I got the rights back….

I think danah notes that she tried to negotiate a change in her contract, and I know that it depends a lot on the publisher. She notes that some people just decide to violate their contract with the publisher, and while I agree that there is some value in that, I am pretty uncomfortable doing so. When I agree to something, I like to stick with it, unless completely unavoidable. As you know, I don’t agree with danah’s tactic here, but I certainly agree that OA is a really important issue.