Working Against Ourselves, Working Together

In the evolving landscape of scholarly communication, librarians not only spend countless hours educating researchers about copyright, subscription licensing, classroom use, author’s agreements, and open access, but they also pay enormous subscription fees to publishers. This is potentially the reality of a system in flux, the fact of being in the middle of a change: we work for reform and enforce the current system in the same breath. Librarians tend to be risk averse, and rightly so, but this caution should not mean that librarians are pacifiers instead of change agents, that we educate while accepting publisher’s models without question or action