Open Access, Libraries, and the Future of Scholarly Publishing

Abstract

Running scholarly presses as profit centers is becoming increasingly unsustainable as many are barely able to stay solvent in todayâ s market economy. Under increasing financial pressures university presses are creating a bottleneck for the publishing of scholarly articles, making less of it available more slowly. By restricting access and limiting outlets for publication, todayâ s commercially structured scholarly publishing system runs counter to the aims of scholarly publishingâ to circulate discourse and research findings through academic institutions and into the world. The open access movement is one response to a general failure of the for-profit scholarly publishing system. This paper looks at what it would mean to reconfigure scholarly publishing away from commerce and toward an open access model, and the potential role of libraries within an open access publishing system.