Open Access and the Library's Missing Mission

"[Dorothea Salo] questions the short-term wisdom of building an institutional repository, then starving it of staff and adding to it only things that are easy to acquire but which won't help solve the financial crisis caused by escalating journal prices. As she puts it, "we can keep feeding the same broken system in hopes it will become less broken. ... Or we can place some longer-term bets, with the explicit understanding that some of them will turn up losers." Her conclusion: "I’d rather place the longer-term bets, myself." I agree....At my college, we've had to sit down with the departments three times in the last ten years to decide which journals to cut. That's what happens when your budget doesn't keep up with increasing prices and you've already cut all the fat....Right now a huge percentage of our library budgets go to renting temporary access to walled gardens planted by publishers who decide what grows there. This is not sustainable. It's not a responsible use of resources. We need to work with those who create knowledge to find a model that serves all of our needs and not just locally, but globally."