Librarian Futures Report

"[From Lorcan Dempsey:] The Open Access label actually covers an extraordinarily complex and interesting array of developments. There is a proliferation of models (characterized by colors and minerals!), a progressively broader agenda (open science, global equity, open monographs, …), and a variety of library investments (repository, APCs, transformative deals, library publishing, open infrastructure, investment in OA organizations, and so on). This is against a background of publisher consolidation, diversification of products into workflow and analytics support, national and funder policy mandates, and variable university attention. At the same time, the prestige economy of scholarly publishing sustains strong reputational incentives for faculty and for universities concerned about reputation and ranking. It imposes new workflow requirements for libraries, as libraries track compliance, APCs, etc. We are seeing multiple paths to no single destination, so what it means for libraries is still very much an open question....

[From Aaron Tay:] Many librarians and library stakeholders, whether in our survey comments or in the discourse on the future of the library, acknowledge that there are now at work and will continue to be, profound changes in scholarly communications, patron behaviors and other contextual forces – all of which bear direct relevance to the evolving role of the librarian. The core point is this: with the growth of Open Access and the patron shift away from the library as their starting point, the collection will diminish in centrality and importance. This, as one commentator put it, should drive librarians to position themselves as important to the knowledge-creating task of the university in different ways’ (Pinfield et al., 2017, 26)...."