Canadian librarian leads worldwide digital revolt for free knowledge http://www.thestar.com/living/article/846033--cana...
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Lesley Ciarula Taylor Staff Reporter A bearded 52-year-old Canadian university librarian is leading a digital revolt that is starting to go global.
It began when an academic database proposed increasing the fee it charges the University of Prince Edward Island by 120 per cent.
Mark Leggott snapped.
“The world’s knowledge is increasingly being held to ransom and available only to those who can pay the fees,†Leggott told the Star on Tuesday.
He announced in a campus-wide letter that as chief librarian he had cancelled UPEI’s subscription to Web of Science and was launching “an effort to create a free and open index to the world’s scholarly literature called ‘Knowledge For All’.â€
Then he contacted librarians in Canada and around the world.
The timing was remarkable. Almost simultaneously, the University of California heard from the journal Nature that its fees were soaring by 400 per cent. UC turned around and urged professors to stop submitting to Nature, one of the world’s most prestigious academic journals, and 66 others in its publishing group.
“This concept of crowdsourcing and appealing to a group who have a common goal can be very powerful,†says Leggott. “I have heard from enough of my colleagues that this can happen.â€
Does he think of himself as a revolutionary?
“No. Maybe I’m a tiny bit more of a risk taker than the average librarian. But librarians are awesome, from standing up to (former U.S. Defense Secretary) Donald Rumsfeld when he brought in the Patriot Act to helping jobless people upgrade their skills.â€
“This is fantastic,†York University librarian Andrea Kosavic said of Leggott’s revolution.
“Aggregators like Web of Science are charging exorbitant fees, making lots and lots of money, and we’re kind of stuck subscribing,†said Kosavic, who is in charge of digital initiatives at York’s libraries. “And there’s a lot of duplication of effort, so a lot of money is wasted.â€
Success, she says, would mean “all students, researchers and public around the world will have access to an exhaustive database of the world’s scholarship, not just the lucky few.â€
She pointed to scholars in the developing world who now cannot hope to have the resources of wealthy Western universities.
The databases Leggott is fighting against are commercial ventures with some of the highest profits in publishing. For example, Elsevier, which publishes 250,000 articles a year in 2,000 journals and maintains an archive of seven million publications, saw profits rise by 10 per cent from 2005 to 2006 to nearly $3 billion.
Leggott realizes the databases need to pay staff, which at Elsevier numbers 7,000. But he counters that the scholars and peer reviewers aren’t paid and the research itself is largely funded by taxpayers, compounded by the monopolies the databases have created for themselves.
The anger in academia has been building. As long ago as 2004, Stanford University criticized Elsevier and other databases for “exploitive or exorbitant pricing.†New journals spring up from academic societies to fight back, splintering research for scholars and librarians.
Leggott’s proposal calls for 10 institutions to kick in $5,000 each to pay for one librarian to do the groundwork to create a free database based on the Wikipedia model.
After that, about $3 million annually would maintain it, he says – a fraction of the hundreds of millions librarians fork over to databases. UPEI Library alone spends a third of its budget on commercial databases
“Even governments are starting to say, ‘Enough is enough,’ said Leggott. “The people have already paid for this research.â€