At March’s SPARC conference in Kansas City and again at the recent Digital Commons meeting at Grand Valley State University, Stephanie Davis-Kahl, Scholarly Communications Librarian and IR manager for Digital Commons @ IWU, inspired attendees with a song. If you’d like to sing along, click here and turn up your speakers!
At first I was afraid, I was petrified
Couldn’t get that RWA off my mind
Issa and Maloney, what a bunch of baloney
Elsevier and all the rest
Time to clean up your stinky mess
Cause knowledge needs to be free
And now you know better than to mess with the worker bee
So FRPPA’s on the rise, that’s the big prize
Time to devise a way to open more eyes
That’s where my students come in,
They’re truly gems
They get that knowledge can’t be condemned
They get that scholarship should transcend
I told them that open access is the key
To health, peace and harmony
Budapest, Suber and SPARC
I gave them readings, hoped to kick-start
Awareness, understanding, and yes,
A little activism for success.
And they exclaimed, how can this be?
These novice economists, so young and carefree
They work hard on their journal, the UER,
For undergraduate research, they raise the bar,
They want to share, and share alike too,
I’m just proud that they have a clue
That the system is broken, but they can help build anew.
So intellectual entrepreneurship
Is the frame I use
To view my work with student publishing, and you should too
To me it means extending students’ view
To how they can advocate and agitate and not be subdued.
Come see my poster, I’ll tell you more
We’ll scheme together how to even the score
(so with apologies and props to Gloria Gaynor)
With bright young minds on our side
We will survive, and yes, we’ll thrive.
