["Innkeeper at the Roach Motel"] is an open-access success story. Before it was even officially published, its preprint version had over four thousand item views. ... This is rather remarkable, considering that it is my first published journal article, it’s about a very constrained niche of librarianship, and I myself have not even four years behind me in the profession.
It gets better. The day it was published, Roach Motel had at least five citations in the literature (plus one student project, which I’m not counting). Two of them were in the same Library Trends issue in which Roach Motel itself appears. I don’t know much about citation patterns in library publishing, but five citations pre-publication also strikes me as rather remarkable! ...
What is unremarkable, given the slow pace of publishing, is that the day it was published, Roach Motel was obsolescent. Don’t get me wrong; it still needed publishing, because not everyone is a leader in this space (as in any space), and watching the discussion at the Repository Infrastructure conference in the UK via Twitter, I see the discourse could still do with a kick in the trousers. Even so, as I told Andrew Albanese in the interview I did for Library Journal’s article, we are moving into a post-Roach-Motel world, and this is a good thing.
Consider, for example, Oregon State University Libraries’ new mandate. Voilà, Roach Motel page 105 made a thing of the past: “Poor repository uptake among academic librarians invites faculty to charge their libraries with hypocrisy… Yet no tenure-track libraries with institutional repository programs have mandated deposit for their own staff’s published and presented materials.” ...
[The world is changing.] And in good ways. ...
And nobody will be happier than I when Roach Motel is completely obsolete.
Posted by
Gavin Baker at 3/18/2009 10:03:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
