Voice of Consciousness

The Race and Policing Research Library (#RxPRL) is live because of me watching the video #PhilandoCastile's death. I was so affected by the emotions behind the voices on the video  that I volunteered to assume responsibility for the collection when we received strong words of warning from well-intentioned lawyers. They were concerned that we were overreaching fair use precedent by providing public access to copyrighted papers at the intersection of research on race and policing. I have since sought legal counsel and restricted functionality of the Library following guidelines posted earlier this week . When the resistance came, I knew deep in my heart that I would do anything to make these files available to the Public. I had just come from Atlanta's #StrategyForChange Townhall meeting at the House of Hope in Decatur, GA, where the community explicitly called for information, education, and wisdom. editorialized versions of the Truth, which are prone to issues of bias and m...

A morning read on Princeton's new Open-access policy gave me food for thought: It's not Open-access that's the mechanism of the revolution, but Ready-Access. Open-Access allows for authors to repost or archive their work. Ready-Access is a term developed by myself to refer to a third party (not the author or the publisher) being able to download copyrighted material. That is what the Race and Policing Research Library (#RxPRL) is trying to achieve. However, it appears -- according to sources versed in open-access policies -- that the #RxPRL will have to become #RxPRR, at least for now. #RxPRR stands for the Race and Policing Research Repository . This would be considered a subject repository , where authors opt-in to have their work archived in the database. For this moment, the repository is located within the library, where the library holds content that we, the Race and Policing Research Working Group, is creating (e.g., bibliographies, indexes) and the repository ho...