How to Scuttle a Scholarly Communication Initiative

Since Clifford Lynch’s infamous call to arms (2003), academic libraries have been wasting their time trying to change the scholarly communication system on the feeblest of rationalizations. Proper librarians know that the current system is obviously the most sustainable, since it’s lasted this long and provided so much benefit to libraries (Rogers, 2012a) and profit to organizations as diverse as Elsevier, Nature Publishing Group, and the American Chemical Society, as well as their CEOs (Berrett, 2012). Moreover, faculty have proclaimed loudly and clearly that they believe libraries’ central role is to be the campus’s collective knowledge wallet (Schonfeld & Housewright, 2010; Lucky, 2012), so who are librarians to argue?

Since Clifford Lynch's infamous call to arms (2003), academic libraries have been wasting their time trying to change the scholarly communication system on the feeblest of rationalizations.Proper librarians know that the current system is obviously the most sustainable, since it's lasted this long and provided so much benefit to libraries (Rogers, 2012a) and profit to organizations as diverse as Elsevier, Nature Publishing Group, and the American Chemical Society, as well as their CEOs (Berrett, 2012).Moreover, faculty have proclaimed loudly and clearly that they believe libraries' central role is to be the campus's collective knowledge wallet (Schonfeld & Housewright, 2010;Lucky, 2012), so who are librarians to argue?Open access cannot possibly succeed in any case, given that "faculty will never just give their work away" (librarian, name withheld, personal communication).Even mere open-access advocacy invites stiff opposition from many faculty, campus administrators, and publishers (including local university-press directors), inviting significant reputational and relationship risk for no corresponding benefit.Actual failure, of course, is such an unacceptable option for beleaguered libraries that failure-prone scholarly communication initiatives cannot be embarked upon until they are sure winners, which in practice means "never." Scholarly communication initiatives such as institutional repositories (IRs), library-sponsored publishing initiatives, open-access author-fee funds, copyright training and consulting, faculty-publication registries, and open-access publisher memberships must therefore be rapidly and effectively squelched, lest the system change in a fashion that disintermediates the existing pattern of library work.If these initiatives flourish, libraries will find themselves in the shoes of abbot Johannes Trithemius, whose De laude scriptorum (1494) presciently railed against the damage that Gutenberg's printing press would do to monasteries' lucrative scriptoria.Protecting the contours of librarian employment is of paramount concern, especially given the manifest impossibility of retraining existing staff to cope with the complexities of copyright (Hirtle, Hudson, & Kenyon, 2009), outreach to faculty (Malenfant, 2010), and digital preservation (Digital Preservation Coalition & University of London Computer Centre, n.d.).
Fortunately, scholarly communication initiatives are straightforward to scuttle, even when foisted upon an otherwise-responsible library by the provost's office or the faculty senate.Given the natural hierarchy of most reputable academic libraries (Maloney, Antelman, Arlitsch, & Butler, 2010), it is of course easiest to put a stop to these misguided efforts from a leadership position, but in truth, any academic librarian can stop them in their tracks.Tried and true, proven-effective techniques follow.

PLANNING
Many libraries successfully scuttle new scholarly communication initiatives before they even begin via planning practices that set these initiatives up to fail.Vague planning scope, plentiful undefined buzzwords (like "institutional repository," itself a phrase with no clear service outline as referent), and dilatory red tape can murder an initiative in its cradle.Phraseology in the planning committee's charge or deliverables that Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication | jlsc-pub.orgJL SC threatens other campus stakeholders such as campus IT, local research centers, or the university press guarantees that the new initiative will have enemies even before its birth.The best, most destructive planning attitude, of course, is that a scholarly communication initiative is a thing (such as an IR or a publication database) that a library sets up (because other libraries do, not for any internally-coherent reason) and then leaves strictly alone, rather than a conscious long-term investment in change to a set of entrenched and difficult-to-modify social, economic, and technological systems.
Careful stacking of the planning committee also vitiates the initiative.Excluding librarians known to be influential among either faculty or their fellow librarians creates organic opposition to the initiative among rank-andfile library staff, as does keeping the committee selection process as secret as possible.The most usefully harmful librarians and outside participants to include on the planning committee are: • ignorant of copyright law and licensing, digital preservation and related technologies, multimedia creation and publication, and scholarshipdissemination practices in disciplines other than their own; • technologically naïve and/or contemptuous of digital technologies (print preservationists may fit here); • professionally, financially, and/or emotionally invested in toll-access publishing (the universitypress director can be an especially savvy choice here, as are many different sorts of librarians, from collection developers to acquisitions specialists); • incurious and resistant to self-education; • resistant to change or incapable of effecting change; and • poor planners, managers, or communicators, ideally all three.
Planning-committee members should not read any publications or reports about scholarly communication published more recently than 2003, and should especially be steered away from the published experience of practitioners (e.g.Hixson, 2006;Buehler & Trauernicht, 2007;Hixson & Cracknell, 2007;Salo, 2008a;Troll Covey, 2009;Wrenn, Mueller, & Shellhase, 2009;Connell & Cetwinski, 2010;Connell, 2011).Mounting evidence that common library approaches to scholarly communication initiatives are ineffectual (e.g.Hixson, 2006;Davis & Connolly, 2007;McDowell, 2007;Salo, 2008a;Troll-Covey 2009;Madsen & Oleen, 2013) should of course be minimized, so that the savvy planner can embed those approaches into the initiative outline in order to weaken it.Above all, if it is likely that the initiative will be run by a new hire, the hiring process must be delayed until planning has run its course, so that the planning committee will not be contaminated with relevant expertise, knowledge, or experience, and the new hire will be forced to inhabit a world he or she never made.
Omitting parts of the planning process crucial to success should also damage the results.Planners should avoid performing market research lest they correctly gauge acceptance potential, much less find early willing partners for the new initiative; they should also avoid reading market research and implementation outcomes from other institutions (e.g.Ferreira, Rodrigues, Baptista, & Saraiva, 2008;Foster & Gibbons, 2008).Planners should be forbidden outright from mentioning the potential initiative to any prospective stakeholders, collaborators, or funders (particularly dean-level or above), lest they decide to support it, or receive the false impression that the library is seriously committed to it.Informing those in positions of power who are likely to oppose the initiative for any reason (including spurious or uninformed reasons) is, of course, a wise move.Pilot projects should be avoided, lest they succeed, generate good word-of-mouth for the new initiative, or ground the initiative plan in local realities.
The new initiative's expressed mission and vision should be vague, grandiose, and impossible to accomplish in any meaningful or measurable way, such as "the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the institution and its community members" (Lynch, 2003) or "serv[ing] as tangible indicators of an institution's quality, thus increasing its visibility, prestige, and public value" (Crow, 2002).Mission and vision must not be broken down into concrete achievable milestones, much less have a timeline drawn up.No plans should be made to assess progress toward milestones, and it should be assumed that all decisions made during the original planning process, including decisions about software, resources, and staffing, will never need to be revisited or altered in any way.Reality and its infinite frustrating curveballs should then do a marvelous job of destroying the new initiative; should they not suffice, the very unmeasurability of the initiative's mission and vision allows the library to discipline the initiative's staff for not meeting them.
Should these measures prove insufficient to kill the new initiative, starving the planning process in other ways may fatally wound it.The expectation that the new initiative must run with the absolute minimum of staff involvement, budget, and technology infrastructure should be clearly made and reiterated as necessary.For example, since it has been perfectly clear for over a decade (contra Swan, 2005) that neither faculty nor librarians willingly self-archive in IRs at scale (Harnad, 2001;Foster & Gibbons, 2005;Hixson, 2006;Joint, 2006;Davis & Connolly, 2007;McDowell, 2007;Bankier & Perciali, 2008;Ferreira, Rodrigues, Baptista, & Saraiva, 2008;Gaffney, 2008;Salo, 2008a;Shreeves & Cragin, 2008;Burris, 2009;Palmer, Dill, & Christie, 2009;Troll Covey, 2009;Koopman & Kipnis, 2009;Bankier & Perciali, 2010;Malenfant, 2010;Connell, 2011;Mercer, 2011 Electronic thesis and dissertation (ETD) initiatives present a special problem for the library desirous of scuttling scholarly communication initiatives: they tend to be popular among many campus stakeholder groups, and are relatively simple to implement because of the political ease of ordering graduate students around.
Still, careful management can ruin even these.Insisting that all theses and dissertations be made open access immediately will alienate patent-seekers and humanists alike, even when they might be content with an ETD initiative allowing embargoes.Creative-writing and finearts programs should be the first to hear about mandatory open-access ETDs, as they will immediately explode with fury sufficient to ensure the defeat of an ETD initiative (Foster 2008a, Foster 2008b).Should ETDs prove too popular to avoid, excluding undergraduate research may still be possible (Davis-Kahl, Hensley, & Shreeves, 2011).

SOFTWARE CHOICE AND MANAGEMENT
The sooner a software package is chosen during the planning process, the more likely it is to be wholly inadequate.It is particularly important to fixate on a software package before the initiative's mission, milestones, and workflows have been decided to maximize the discrepancies between necessary work and the software's capabilities, as well as to constrain service models to what the software permits.For best results, choose software based on one technologically-naïve librarian's brief conversation with a vendor on a conference exhibit floor; the less the librarian knows about local needs and workflows, the better.
One exception to the preceding rule involves insisting upon a mission or service model for which the software likely to be chosen is known to be hopelessly inadequate.
A common example is insisting that IRs handle records management, despite the utter lack of scheduling, arrangement, true dark archiving (including of metadata), bulk automated ingest, and disposal capacities in most IR software packages and services.Research universities can also scuttle an IR by insisting that it solve the entirety of the campus's research-data management and storage problems over the entire data lifecycle, though IR software and services have clearly been designed for only the very end of content-production lifecycles.
Usability testing or piloting of any software that will become part of the initiative's infrastructure should be avoided lest the software chosen fulfill local requirements.Likewise, reading software comparisons (e.g.Fay, 2010;Samuels & Griffy, 2012) or asking librarians at other institutions about their experiences risks injecting dangerous amounts of intelligence into the softwareselection process.If questioning experienced librarians cannot be avoided, it should happen where the librarians JL SC are clearly speaking on the public record so that they feel they cannot discuss negative experiences.Substituting in-person or webinar-based vendor pitches or "training," biased and incomplete as they invariably are, often bestows a useful illusion of informed choice.Finally, it is wise to choose software whose developers are heavily focused on the minutiae of digital preservation or standards compliance, since they are likely to give short shrift to librarian and end-user usability.The more hostile toward, dismissive of, or defensive about usability these developers are, the more likely their software is to damage a scholarly communication initiative.
Specific features to look for in order to secure the leastusable, least-useful software available include: • a login system that cannot be tied into the institution's existing authentication and authorization mechanisms; • Byzantine privilege-assignment systems; the more difficult, time-consuming, and confusing it is to add, change, and subtract user privileges, the better (Salo, 2008b); • lengthy, inflexible, poorly-labeled metadata-entry screens, without helpful autocompletes or default values; • inexplicable, unrecoverable errors and error messages (Salo, 2008b); • jargon and verbosity in the interface's language; • ugly, outdated, difficult-to-change visual design, or design not adapted well to mobile use; • as many unnecessary clicks, dropdown menus, and other obtrusive interface excrescences as possible; • inability to batch-edit existing metadata, ensuring widespread authority-control problems (Salo, 2009) and useless subject keywording, both of which make the initiative look inept to end-users; • for web-facing software, hostility to (or fragility faced with) search-engine crawlers; at minimum, inability to create search-engine-friendly sitemaps ("sitemaps.org-Home," 2008); and • no usable APIs or plugin/mod architectures; ideally, third-party systems should be prevented from interacting with the software at all, but if that cannot be managed, APIs should be as limited, obfuscated, undocumented, library-specific, and web-developer-unfriendly as possible.
For IRs specifically, the following criteria should be considered as well: • poor handling of third-party/mediated deposit, e.g.assuming that the person performing the deposit possesses sufficient intellectual-property rights in the deposited content to grant the IR a license to it; • a requirement that interested depositors be explicitly given deposit privileges by a system administrator, thereby eliminating immediate gratification and point-of-need deposit demonstrations; • unintuitive, inexplicable collection structures and internal naming/reference practices, ideally leading to fragile, impenetrable URLs for deposited materials; • inability to limit end-user access to deposits and their metadata, or failing that, an inexplicable, inflexible access-limitation system with poor usability that must be directly enabled and tweaked by system administrators to be used at all; • unnecessary and ideally meaningless filename changes to deposited files; • inability to version or change deposited files or metadata, or failing that, requiring that system administrators perform all such changes, ideally through the most error-prone, technicallyconvoluted process possible (Salo, 2008c); • inability to perform batch deposits, or failing that, batch deposit only available to system administrators or those with server access; and • no feedback to depositors and initiative staff about pageviews and download numbers for deposited items, or if this cannot be avoided, no API access to this information.
Once a software package has been chosen, initiative staff should be walled away from its internal workings as much as possible, especially when those staff are technicallyinclined enough to do useful work.Ideally, entire suites of desirable features should be unavailable for use, either because initiative staff cannot activate or configure them due to lack of access to configuration files on the server, or because they must rely on intransigent vendors for assistance.Depriving initiative staff of access to web designers, programmers, and system administrators obviously causes damage as well; custom design and development in particular must not be allowed, to let bugs and other software warts cause the most damage possible.

STAFFING
Several staffing anti-patterns serve equally well to hobble a scholarly communication initiative.Which, or which combination, is most suitable for a given library depends on its existing situation, particularly with respect to current staffing levels and available open positions.All initiative staff, however, whether dedicated wholly or in part to the initiative, should be encouraged to act as gatekeepers, discouraging participation from other librarians and from faculty.Granting them administrator privileges in software (as for an IR) often suffices; drunk with power, they may refuse to grant privileges to anyone else, reducing spontaneous participation (lackluster as that is likely to be in any case) to zero.

Committees
The more dysfunctional and ineffectual committee culture is in a given library, the stronger the case for assigning oversight of the scholarly communication initiative to a committee.The guidelines given above for stacking a planning committee apply equally to an oversight committee.Moreover, if those most directly responsible for (or most supportive of ) the initiative are new or junior staff, stacking the committee with supervisors and administrators will ensure that the initiative's staff are suppressed like Lewis Carroll's dormouse, their ideas and concerns unaired and unheeded.A strong supervisor/ administrator presence also ensures that few on the committee will be willing to do necessary low-level grunt work.
The committee should ideally not have a charge at all, but if a charge must be drafted, it should be (like the initiative's own vision and mission) as vague, grandiose, and unmeasurable as possible.No budget should be allocated to the committee, nor should it be empowered to require work from any staff member not on the committee.Clear success has been achieved when the committee will not so much as participate in an international event such as Open Access Week (Higginbotham, n.d.).

Deadwood
Shuffling an ineffectual librarian on the existing staff into a dedicated scholarly communication position accomplishes two goals at once: destroying scholarly communication initiatives and placing bad librarians (especially those who are unfirable because of tenure or local hiring culture) someplace they cannot hinder the real work of libraries.These positions may also permit politically-useful, nepotistic, or other insider-baseball hires to be placed where their incompetence will provide a net benefit to the library.An organic benefit of this approach to staffing is that all other library staff will refuse to take the new initiative seriously because of the individual running it.

Existing staff
Adding scholarly communication responsibilities to existing staff's workloads without consulting them, much less shifting any other responsibilities away from them, ensures that staff will devote exactly zero time to scholarly communication work.It also forges an entirely new base of resentful opposition to the initiative.Neither training nor additional budget should be available to staff.Their position descriptions should not explicitly mention scholarly communication, nor should their employee reviews take activity related to it into account, to give them cover in ignoring it (Malenfant, 2010).Similarly, the less clear to them and their supervisors their intended contributions and outcomes are, the better.

New hires
Stealing a hiring line from another library department for a scholarly communication initiative creates organic opposition to the new hire and the initiative, while a temporary or visiting hire signals that the library will shut down the new initiative immediately after the hiree shuffles off the payroll.In addition, hiring scholarly communication staff from outside the institution ensures that they will labor under a heavy political-capital deficit from the outset of their employment.The more contested, acrimonious, and obtuse the planning process is, the worse the new hire's deficit will be as resentment of the planning process and its result naturally accrues to the new hire.A new library-school graduate will suffer from the greatest capital deficit, and is least likely to have the interpersonal skills and experience with library politics to recover from it.In contrast, not insisting that the new hire have an ALA-accredited degree ensures that librarians will both despise and feel threatened by the new hire; the new hire is likely also to know considerably less about how libraries work.The best new hire, then, is a paraprofessional or new MLS graduate wholly new to the institution who has been hired into a visiting position stolen from another library department.
A carefully-written job ad may scuttle the initiative altogether by being unfillable; even should it fall short of that enviable ideal, it may enforce a poor hire.The best way to develop a thoroughly unworkable position description that still looks sufficiently realistic to be unassailable is to crib indiscriminately from other institutions' position descriptions, or from the ubiquitous skillsand-requirements roundups in the LIS literature and elsewhere (e.g.Kinkus, 2007;Rosenblum, 2008;Iandoli, 2009).This strategy works because the outcomes of the searches represented by these descriptions (measured by search success, candidate-pool quality, or any subsequent assessment of actual employee or initiative success) are never evaluated, such that many position descriptions are flights of fancy.A little cleverness, then, suffices to piece together a laundry list of required skills that not even a demigod could encompass, or a list of position responsibilities that no three people could actually achieve.Only naïve new MLS graduates and desperate unemployed librarians will apply, throwing the initiative into immediate jeopardy; resulting hiring difficulties can be blamed on library schools.

PSYCHOLOGICAL TECHNIQUES
Previous sections of this paper address direct strikes at a scholarly communication initiative's processes, infrastructure, and staffing.While effective, these interventions may not suffice to stamp out the initiative altogether without an allied barrage against the morale and efficacy of staff associated with the initiative.This section addresses that challenge.

Hypocrisy
Library policy and librarian behavior should clearly signal to the institution that the scholarly communication initiative should not exist, to undercut its staff as they promote the initiative and its associated ideals (e.g.open access, open data, digital preservation).
Common hypocrisies to foster surrounding scholarly communication include: • never self-archiving, especially not in the local IR; • never publishing in open-access journals; • never asking journal publishers about rights retention; • donating authorship, review, and editorial labor to those that regularly lobby against open access, preferably toll-access LIS journals belonging to tollaccess-funded publishing corporations; • establishing publication requirements for tenure, retention, or promotion that disadvantage openaccess journals (insisting on "established journals" often suffices, since open-access journals are usually newer), do not require or even mention selfarchiving, and encourage staff to donate review and editorial labor to toll-access LIS journals owned by anti-open-access publishing corporations; • placing unnecessary legal or quasi-legal restrictions on reuse of digitized and born-digital library collections (Eschenfelder, 2009) to signal broadbased library opposition to openness and reuse; and • expressing confidence in the library's continued or even increased ability to serve patron needs under toll-access scholarly communication systems.
The above stances naturally do additional useful damage to scholarly communication initiatives when adopted by library administrators to whom library staff and campus faculty and administrators look for example.
It is especially vital to quash all discussion of a library open-access mandate, particularly when a campus open-access mandate is in play.Implementing such a "patchwork" mandate (Sale, 2007), as Oregon State University Library's experience demonstrates (Brown, 2009), intrigues faculty and gives library-based scholarly communication initiatives credibility on the broader campus that they must not be permitted to earn.

The fundamental attribution error
The fundamental attribution error is the name assigned by psychologists to the human tendency to personalize error and failure by blaming them on an individual and his/ her distinctive traits rather than the system in which the individual is embedded.Encouraging the fundamental attribution error in everyone who interacts with the new initiative both savages the initiative and absolves everyone but the initiative's staff members of responsibility for any difficulties associated with it.
Libraries can even cause their own scholarly communication staff to subscribe to the fundamental attribution error, losing their grip on reality enough to blame themselves for every difficulty they encounter.Such staff must merely be convinced that their colleagues are helpful, their tasks are achievable, and their environment is hospitable to their work, despite the effort the library has specifically expended to ensure that none of this is true.An additional fallacy useful to instill is the notion that no one in their position anywhere else is experiencing any difficulty, ergo something must be wrong with them or their approach; emailing them "how we done it good" articles from the literature, especially when the articles describe tools or services that local staff have neither resources nor authority to implement, works well.These tactics are quite likely to cause the initiative's staff members to burn out and depart.Especially adept brainwashing may even convince them to leave the library profession altogether, doing a service to all of academic librarianship by reducing the chance that scholarly communication initiatives will arise (much less succeed) elsewhere.Moreover, any library service is most politically vulnerable when unstaffed; all opportunities to kill a scholarly communication initiative outright while it has no voice among library staff should be seized upon.
All-staff meetings and conferences offer unique opportunities for every librarian to reinforce the fundamental attribution error.Onstage or off-, widespread expression of skepticism toward scholarly communication initiatives will affirm opposition to them, demoralize those involved in them, and convince the undecided that opposing them is the smart career move.Individuals need not even be explicitly targeted; the fundamental attribution error ensures that the default assumption will be that those with documented responsibility for scholarly communication initiatives must be solely and uniquely responsible for any challenges or failures such initiatives encounter.

Microaggressions
Chester M. Pierce (1974) famously coined the term microaggression to mean "brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults toward people of other races."The concept has since had its scope expanded beyond racism to include many other situations of repeated small-scale barbs that erode targets' morale over time.Given the scant staffing and minimal political capital of scholarly communication initiatives, microaggressions are an easy, safe, devastating weapon against them.Those who employ this tactic must be sure to keep the pressure on; repetition is the key to microaggressions' success.
The hypocrisies mentioned above often serve as microaggressions.Other useful microaggressions may either disparage scholarly communication reform in general, or be specific to local scholarly communication initiatives and their staff.Generally-aimed microaggressions that discredit open access, scholarly communication reform, and library support for such reform include: • calling scholarly communication initiatives a fad, accusing them of stealing resources from more fundamental library services, or calling them "the future" with the implication that they are presently ignorable; • characterizing scholarly communication work as unimportant or "not library work"; • attacking or dismissing pro-open-access reports, news articles, and blog posts (ideally within earshot of scholarly communication staff); • forwarding anti-open-access reports, news articles, and blog posts to the most comprehensive available library-staff mailing list; • forwarding reports, news articles, and blog posts critical of libraries' contribution to open access to the most comprehensive available library-staff mailing list; • writing and publishing such reports, articles, and blog posts; • expressing open, public distrust in digital publishing, open-access publishing, repositories (of any sort, disciplinary as well as institutional), and bibliometric measures aside from the journal impact factor; • expressing open, public distrust in open-access publishing because of scam open-access journals, while suppressing discussion of the many quality problems in toll-access journals (Guterman, 2008;Fang, Steen, & Casadevall, 2012); and • expressing incredulity that change in scholarly communication systems (or in allied efforts, such as digital preservation) is in any way feasible, much less necessary and sustainable.
Microaggressions specifically trained on local initiatives and staff include: • drawing lines in the sand around the library and its services (e.g. in library mission and vision statements, library strategic plans, or librarian publications) that do not include scholarly communication or any area with which it overlaps (e.g.digital preservation); • implying that scholarly communication staff chose their jobs because the topic is "hot" and they are venal, not because they enjoy or believe in their work; • asking scholarly communication staff "What exactly do you do all day?"; • scoffing at scholarly communication staff with significant technical skill, e.g. by implying that they could secure far more important and betterremunerated jobs than the one they have; • hiding or discarding scholarly communication outreach materials (see Figure 1); • insisting that patrons use only "trusted, quality" materials, defining that set as "materials the library has bought" and excluding open-access materials from it (Dorner, 2012); and • for libraries with digital collections separate from the IR, cherrypicking projects away from the IR and its staff without crediting or involving them, regardless of how much work they did.For best results, microaggressions should be employed where the target is isolated among a group of hostile colleagues (ideally including several higher in seniority and authority than the target), or otherwise prevented from responding.Microaggressions should also be employed within earshot of librarians sympathetic to scholarly communication initiatives, to isolate scholarly communication staff further from the rest of the library and to intimidate potential allies into remaining silent and refusing help.Any attempt by targets to respond to microaggressions, or evinced frustration in the face of microaggressions, should be reported to the targets' management chain as a failure of collegiality.

Library administrators
Library administrators are naturally in the best position to ruin scholarly communication planning processes, not least because they control the planning committee's membership and charge.Even when planning ends, they can easily starve scholarly communication initiatives and staff of infrastructure, budget resources, and authority to plan and execute events and services.Administrators can also raise false hopes in scholarly communication staff by loudly and publicly touting their commitment to scholarly communication initiatives (e.g. in strategic plans), then dash those hopes by starving the initiatives of resources.For the greatest impact, these initiatives should be defunded without discussing the defunding with initiative staff, or even warning them of potential An effective "kill it with kindness" approach is to express fear that the service will be so successful that the library and its staff will be unable to absorb the new workload.This traps the service coming and going, leaving it no way to be "just successful enough." Library administrators should also criticize whatever policy, strategy, and tactics the initiative staff adopt as publicly as the library's culture allows; other librarians should be tacitly encouraged to do so as well.For example, during verbal progress reports on the initiative, especially when other campus stakeholders are auditors, administrators should visibly demonstrate their disappointment in the initiative's progress and its staff's efforts; one heavy sigh or shake of the head is worth a thousand words, and vastly less accountable to boot.Ordinary staff-demoralization tactics such as ignoring honors received by scholarly communication staff, forgetting their names and titles, bypassing their publications, disregarding their suggestions and requests, calling on external sources of relevant expertise rather than theirs, and leaving them off relevant library and institutional committees can also be expected to have their accustomed impacts.
Employee review processes offer special opportunity to confuse and dismay scholarly communication staff.Supervisors should lean heavily on the fundamental attribution error, making clear that scholarly communication staff themselves are solely responsible for any difficulties they encounter.When these staff express concern about their work environment, they should be ordered to be more collegial and their concerns should be ignored; if they express actual frustration, it should be treated as an occasion for discipline.Administrators JL SC can also monitor the social-media presences of scholarly communication staff for actionable signs of frustration, especially those staff members too savvy to provide more obvious excuses deserving of discipline.The truth value of the offending staff members' assertions or frustrations should be irrelevant to disciplinary measures taken, though it must be noted that shoot-the-messenger disciplinary measures are most feasible where librarians are not faculty and do not have academic freedom of expression.
Finally, staff purges provide a main chance to destroy scholarly communication initiatives by eliminating their staff first, sending a clear message to the rest of the library about how expendable these initiatives are and how their staff should be treated (McMaster University Faculty Association, 2009).

Liaisons, catalogers, and other normal librarians
As
After all, the academic library as formalized in the 1970s and 1980s has clearly reached its Platonic paradigmatic ideal, from which any change can only mean devolution (Mason, 1972).

AUTHOR'S NOTE
The

Figure
Figure 1.Properly-placed scholarly communication outreach materials: an untidy pile on an unused desk concealed behind boxes of other unwanted detritus they should not offer to help correct and augment.At all times, technical-services librarians should make clear that redundant cataloging of commodity materials is vastly more important than original-metadata capture and augmentation for the materials found in an IR.Systems librarians and library developers should unequivocally bar scholarly communication staff, regardless of their level of technology skill, from back-end access to software.They should also deny scholarly communication initiatives their time and expertise; library administrators, who always have higher-priority information technology projects than scholarly communication initiatives, are often natural allies in this endeavor.Systems staff should not help less-technical scholarly communication staff frame bug reports or requests for improvement; if they must, they may request bugfixes and improvements that help them alone, but they should never request usability or feature improvements.Under no circumstances should library developers volunteer time to scholarly communicationrelated open-source software projects, nor should they offer support for these projects on mailing lists even when they understand the software well.Alternately, confusing and insulting help-seekers on these mailing lists is an advanced microaggression tactic available to developers.
tone of this piece was indirectly inspired by the immortal Machiavelli and Swift, and directly inspired by the unsurpassed tongue-in-cheek closing keynote "Extensible stability, open standards, and other cameleopards" by C.M. Sperberg McQueen at the Markup Technologies '99 conference.Its content largely derives from many, many sad and infuriating stories told me by treasured professional colleagues and former students, whose honesty, perseverance, and courage I gratefully acknowledge, and hope to requite by telling their stories openly when they themselves dare not.While nothing in this paper was invented from whole cloth, and I have done my best to cite publicly-documented evidence where it exists, such public evidence does not exist for many of the behaviors I recount, not even in the form of anecdote.This constitutes an obvious and substantial weakness in the paper.Rigorous qualitative and quantitative research aimed at establishing the prevalence of these behaviors and quantifying the damage they do would be most welcome, provided that research subjects still employed in scholarly communication can be protected from workplace retaliation.(I am far from the only former scholarly communication librarian; qualitative investigations of professionals like me would naturally incur less risk to subjects.)I should note that authors other than myself cited in this paper were not in on the joke.I intentionally sprinkled "stunt citations" throughout (especially in the Introduction and Conclusion) that flatly contradict the text associated with them.I apologize to authors whose work I have thus traduced, and I exhort readers not to assume that what my text implies about any citation is true.Bibliometricians: have fun untangling what citations mean in this one!