The academic library should be a benefactor for community-owned publishing | Impact of Social Sciences

"Across countries in the global north the transition to open access to research has in recent years been driven largely through library consortia and national institutions striking transformative agreements with commercial publishers. Drawing on recent work on The University of Sheffield’s content strategy, Peter Barr argues that academic libraries can play a larger role in fostering community owned scholarly publishing.... Despite the fact that institutions and funders ultimately provide the money and set the culture within which research is conducted, they have devolved the practicalities of the transition to open research to academic libraries. The assumption being that libraries can leverage their long-standing relationships with academic publishers to negotiate ‘Transformative’ agreements that ensure research is published open access, but these relationships are dysfunctional. In reality, what libraries have proved is that they are skilled at finding the funds to pay for ever escalating ransom notes, more than they are successful in building equitable partnerships with publishers...."