LITA Members Talk Tech Trends | ALA Midwinter 2015

" ... Carpenter began his trend discussion by outlining the 'tremendous amount' of technology used to support subscription-based assets and content, including subscription agents, electronic data interchange (EDI) to communicate and process orders, International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) assignments, and metadata management. 'My trend is, essentially, how are those systems going to have to change, as open access really transforms how scholarly communication takes place?' Carpenter said. Estimating that paid academic subscriptions were a $12 billion business in 2014, Carpenter added that 'we don’t have a model for how that system would work, and I guarantee you that the publishing community…the patron community, and institutions…do not want to process anything like $12 billion on departmental credit cards.' Open access already accounts for between 10 percent and 20 percent of scholarly articles published each year, and it is currently growing 18 percent per year, Carpenter said. 'At what point does this trend significantly impact the library systems that need to manage that information?' These concerns would apply not only to the systems used to process open access articles, but to discovery systems that may need to surface open access content in hybrid journals containing both paid subscription and open access content. 'You’re talking about managing metadata on an article level, not a journal level, which is a significant difference,' he said ..."