What are the next steps for open access? – IO: In The Open

"I want to suggest three ways that library consortia can help universities begin to wean themselves from the unsustainable system of scholarly communication that developed in the era of printing and begin to usher in the next stage of open access scholarship:

• Consortia are well placed to develop the infrastructure to connect our institutional repositories and to develop services on top of them. This step would increase the effectiveness of Green OA exponentially, and open up opportunities, such as text and data mining, that we currently seem to rely (wrongly, imo) on permission from commercial interests to exploit.

• Consortia could help broker a coordinated approach to library publishing, where specific groups of universities take on particular disciplines in which to publish. Thus strong nodes of disciplinary expertise and a critical mass of materials could be created. Such coordinated publishing, undertaken in collaboration with university presses and scholarly societies, could be a key to breaking the grip that legacy publishers have over scholarship.

• Consortia could organize conversations amongst provosts and presidents about how scholars and scholarship are evaluated. Libraries often think of this as an intractable problem, and political forces, as well as inertia beset our conversations on our own campuses. One way to break this logjam is to gather together a critical mass of campus leaders and guide them in a conversation with each other. For the most part they know that the current system is absurd, using surrogates for quality that were never intended for that purpose. In fact, we spend millions – billions, collectively – to purchase social capital from commercial entities, even while the work that builds that capital is done pro bono by our own faculty. More than anything else, this system cries out to be reclaimed by our universities. Consortial conversations, where our campus leaders have a chance to talk and bargain with each other, might be the way forward."