NZLIMJ Editorial, Vol 57, Issue 1.

The articles in this edition of the NZ Library and Information Management Journal span across all our interests

– reading in the lives of those with Alzheimer’s, cataloging picture books, helping students with referencing supporting

those with dyslexia and copyright. We’re a small and diverse community (who encourage diversity) with

interests as wide as the world.

I’m buzzing after attending the research librarians SIG conference in Auckland last month (and I encourage all

of you who presented to submit something to us). It was very professionally run, with a sense of collegiality and

kindness. More values I expect from librarians.

The question of Open Access was the main point of a workshop at the conference, and all the topics I mentioned

above all relate to access. Access to information, accessibility to resources for different parts of the community,

and easing finding those resources. It’s what we do. Open Access is a technical term that relates to research, and

the standards that must be met to get the term. There are several formal declarations and definitions, but if it is

free to read and free to reuse – then its OA.

We’ve been working on making the NZLIMJ more open – adopting formal open Creative Commons licences, and

using finding aids like DOIs. We don’t charge for publication and the copyright of the articles remains with the

authors. We can do this because of the work done by LIANZA – this is one of the many things your registration

and association fees goes to, as do many societies around the globe. These are the technical parts of expressing

our values.

Some, like the recently retired provocateur Jeffrey Beall, claim that librarians “have poisoned scholarly communication,

using their often state-funded positions to ennoble themselves (and advance their careers) as combatants

fighting the good fight…” (Beall, 2018, pp. 2–3). Ignoring the fact that Beall has made a one-man industry

out of hyperbolic claims on the dangers of OA, the move to improving access to information has created some

real friction and change in business models around publishing research. Change is hard, uneven and results in

unexpected consequences.

The work we are doing in opening up the NZLIMJ is designed to create a more transparent, more findable and

more progressive space for us to measure how we can best improve appropriate access to information in our

patch. We are going to ask previous authors of papers published in the NZLIMJ if they would allow us to republish

their work with an Open Access licence (Creative Commons Attribution: cc-by). We’re not doing this to virtue signal

– as Beall might have us believe. We’re doing it to fulfil the calling we had when we got into this business, to make

the world’s knowledge freely and equitably accessible.

If you want to talk to us about articles you’ve published in t