At ACRLog (with their new sense-making URL http://acrlog.org/), Steven Bell wants to know Are You Reading These Journals? He’s wondering if it is worth getting excited when a review of his book is published in a traditional (or, in the case of portal, semi-traditional) academic librarianship journal, or if journal readership has gone the way of the rubber-stamped due date.

So he came up with a little survey. If many people answer like I did (i.e., all over the map) I’m not sure that Bell will be able to draw any useful conclusions. But he’s not billing it as a big research project, but just a little questionnaire.

His overall question, though–does anyone actually read this stuff?–chimed with another blog post I had just read, Heather Morrison’s Aiming for Obscurity (definitional post) which I came to via Peter Suber’s Open Access News. Here is the nut:

[A]uthors who continue to publish in toll-access journals and do not self-archive can be said to be aiming for obscurity. In other words, an author in this position is pursuing a course of action which is very likely to decrease the probably of the author’s work being read and cited.

This is such common-sense that you’d think it needn’t be said at all, but this phrase “aiming for obscurity” wraps it up nicely. There are valid reasons for wanting to publish in a more traditional journal rather than just going straight to a blog or other unmediated publication. But if you want people to actually read it once it is published, it seems to be more and more imperative that it be freely linkable on the web somewhere. Especially in a field like librarianship, where so many practitioners are outside the academy and can’t count on their institution footing the bill for the subscriptions, we owe it to ourselves to self-archive.

Having said that, I now realize that I haven’t done so myself. I have published a few things in journals over the last couple of years, and I have mostly made sure that I’d be allowed to self-archive. Then I didn’t do it. By this time next week, there will be links available.