The History and Future of Academic Library Collecting in Eleven Pictures

"Open access is inevitable and will become the business model for much of scholarly publishing. I have made the case that open access publishing is a disruptive innovation as the business theorist Clayton Christensen would define it, and that as such it will inevitably become the dominant business model for scholarly publishing.17 As Christensen points out disruption innovations tend to impact not only a set of producers, rather disruptive innovations impact the full value chain of an industry. Academic libraries are part of the value chain of scholarly publishing and as such we are likely to see our business models at risk in the coming disruption to nearly the same extent that scholarly publishers will....From the library perspective open access means two things. The first is easy to appreciate — if something is open access libraries don’t have to buy it. This is a relief on library budgets. The second is less appreciated, but maybe more important. Libraries are not required for readers to use the content. Today the scholarly universe looks something like the figure below. Note that there are more dark blue circles on the outside of the universe. This represents new collections that a library will take on, usually as open access projects. Most often this will be content created at the institution or of strong interest to it. The library will take on the responsibility of curating this content for the world...."