Pirates and Librarians: Big Media, Technology, and the Role of Liberal Education, D. Aram Donabedian, John Carey

"In the face of the alarming price increases of information resources, the question naturally arises, How much influence should the market wield? Clearly the elimination of most competitors and the centralization of power by a small group of publishing giants encourages price-fixing and correlates with the stratospheric rise in library subscriptions in recent decades. This underscores the need for open access to serve as a countervailing force in scholarly communications against the commercial plundering of our library budgets.... The open access movement opens up a space where the scholarly community can organize together to assert their vision of a system in which researchers are free to share and reuse knowledge. In fact, this type of organizing and advocacy is essential if libraries are to not only reassert control over their collections but also support liberal education—especially at non-elite institutions or in developing countries.... Thus, despite the often grim fiscal constraints libraries now face, online collaborative technologies and open access offer librarians an unheralded opportunity to create a more inclusive scholarly community...."