A new Medium article, from the head of Ingenta Connect, “Is the Open Access discoverability problem solvable? And whose problem is it?”. It’s a cursory look at the problem, but even then it’s interesting for what it doesn’t say…

* For “institutional librarians” the author seems to imply that their future role is only to be in one-to-one “mentoring and facilitation” of researchers. No mention of anything else, like the big publishers working with librarians to craft and adopt universal OA-status tagging code for discoverability.

* For “scholarly authors” he only suggests academics might become marketeers for their own papers. Frankly, this seems like a waste of their valuable time. Given the salaries that full-time research academics get, they can afford to hire a virtual assistant. To promote four or five papers a year outside of one’s own disciplinary niche, simply go to UpWork (or similar) and hire your personal marketeer at $180 a paper (to get someone of quality, for a day and-a-half of work). One could probably find a way to write the $900 bill off against tax each year. Of course that assumes one is publishing something worth reading, rather than academic shovel-ware intended to tick boxes inside one’s own institution.

* For the big “publishers” the article vaguely suggests they need to embrace openness. Though perhaps only in order to capture it for their own purposes, via a… “drawing-together of all the dispersed OA content silos into one place”. Well, for their own limited set of OA content, the big publishers can solve that on Monday morning if they really want it. They just have to allow the seemingly-stalled Paperity to import the OA-only article feeds of Elsevier, Brill, Degruyter, Wiley and others, so that Paperity has full coverage of all OA articles from the big publishers.