My new project launching today: The Quisling Qourner: A group blog on the library/publisher relationship [Confessions of a Science Librarian]

It’s been really gratifying over the last year to see how my DSCaM scholarly communications empire has grown. From it’s small beginnings, Dupuis Science Computing & Medicine has craved out a small but important niche in the discount APC publishing community.

And I really appreciate how the scholarly communications community has encouraged my career progression from publisher of a journal at Elsevier to Chief Advisor on Science Libraries for the Government of Canada to last year’s huge launch of DSCaM.

And the DSCaM empire grows.

This year I would like to announce the launch of a major new initiative: The Quisling Qorner: A Group Blog on the Library/Publisher Relationsship.

I like to think of this new blogging community as being a fellow traveller with the longstanding Scholarly Kitchen blog. As well, we’d like to welcome the brand new In the Open: Libraries, Scholarship, and Publishing blog to the scholarly communications group blog family. While the Scholarly Kitchen tends to take the publisher’s side of things and IO seems headed more towards a bias in the library direction, I think the QQ has it’s own important niche.

And that niche would be the firm belief that the library side and the publisher side of the story are really the same tale, that libraries and publishers should be friends and colleagues of the highest order, that we are essentially on the same side of all the important issues in scholarly communication, that our interests are so intrinsically and explicitly tied together that they are essentially the same.

Publishers are librarians’ best friends, they know what’s good for us and we should just follow their lead in important matters.

Heaven knows, as librarians we’ve enjoyed so much publisher hospitality at conferences — the wine! the cheese! the free pens! — that it’s really time for us to give back. There have been too many years of tragic misunderstanding and animosity between the two communities.

And repairing that damaged relationship will be the role of The Quisling Qorner. I’ve invited a plethora of the brightest lights in librarianship, some well known, some up-and-comers, to contribute their thoughts about how we can bring librarians and publishers closer together. I’ve also invited friends and colleagues in the scientific and publishing communities to weight in on some of those same issues as well a provide of broader perspective of how libraries and librarians can serve their interests exclusively.

 

Finally, I’d like to announce the first set up amazing posts that I’m publishing today. I’m a firm believer that any new blogging project needs to launch with enough initial content to draw people in and keep them reading.

So here goes — the first set of posts, all by shining lights in the library/publisher interface universe!

• I Gave Up My Librarian Values and You Won’t Believe What Happened Next by Wayne Bivens-Tatum
• Losing Our Librarian Values: Case Studies in Corporate Shills by Wayne Bivens-Tatum
• Cost of Knowledge! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing! by Amy Buckland
• Corporate Publishers Add Real Value in Service of the Public Interest by Björn Brembs
• BREAKING: Top Journals Really Do publish the World’s Best Science, According to New Study by Björn Brembs
• Predatory Open Access Publishers Are the Worst Thing Ever and Big Commercial Publishers Are Coming to the Rescue by John Dupuis
• Modern Access to Scientific Research: Elsevier Shows the Way by Barbara Fister
• I am publishing only in paywalled journals because those lesser librarians don’t deserve to read my work by Abigail Goben
• Silencing Librarians for Fun and profit: Part 1 by The Library Loon
• Silencing Librarians for Fun and profit: Part 2 by The Library Loon
• Silencing Librarians for Fun and profit: Part 3 by The Library Loon
• Silencing Librarians for Fun and profit: Part 4 by The Library Loon
• Silencing Librarians for Fun and profit: Part 5 by The Library Loon
• One Word: Artificial Scarcity by Cameron Neylon
• Why Libraries Are Happy to Fund Publishers’ Lobbying Efforts by Christina Pikas

 
And here’s a few titles for forthcoming posts, all either written and in the pipeline or under development by the authors!

• Paywalled Journals Are the Best, Only the Best, They Are HUUUUUUGE, I’ll Build a Wall Around Them So Only the Good Scientists Can Read My Articles and Make Science Great Again by Donald Trump
• PLoS Should Buy a Majority Stock in Elsevier: Here’s Why by Roberta Eksevierian
• Why APCs Are the One True Way Forward for Publisher Business Models by Cameron Neylon
• Fire all Older Librarians and Give Their Salaries to Elsevier by Phillipa Springster
• Thomson Reuter’s ISI Makes all Citation Data Open Access in Bid to Thwart Allegations of Impact Factor Manipulations by Sharma Singh
• Non-Disclosure Agreements as a Preferred Library Bargaining Tactic by Frances Taylor

 

And please consider this an open call. Everyone should go right ahead and pitch post ideas in the comments!

And the first authors’ meeting will be in Stockholm in 2017! Paid for by all those fantastic publishers!

Source: http://scienceblogs.com/confessions/2016/04/01/my-new-project-creating-a-group-blog-on-the-librarypublisher-relationship-the-quisling-qorner/