When I saw the title of Mita’s most recent post, The internet was designed to route around gatekeepers, I was expecting and hoping for a cool example or tool along the lines of Jump the Paywall. Alas, her post is actually a sober reminder that “publishers don’t need academic libraries to reach faculty or students anymore.” This, of course, isn’t new, but I have to admit, even after posting one of her examples, I hadn’t really put all of what she describes together for myself.
She goes on to suggest that libraries might consider subsidizing reviewers rather than covering article processing fees for open-access titles. The idea is that if professionals were paid rather than volunteering, the whole peer-review process might move a little faster. I like that idea 🙂
But what I *really* took away from her post was the reminder of something those outside the profession probably don’t know about us; how strongly we take patron privacy, and how, in going directly to the consumer (student, faculty), publishers can learn an awful lot more about users than they ever could when users were consistently anonymized behind a proxy server.
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