The Academic Library in the Face of Cooperative and Commercial Paths to Open Access

Abstract:  This paper sets out the place of the academic library within the digital-era developments of open access to research and scholarship. It analyzes how this development, now that open access is becoming a scholarly norm and common goal for scholarly publishing, is taking two forms, both of which are about making the move, if not a flip, from the subscription model for the circulation of journals to that of open access. The paper sets out the terms and instances of the two paths to open access. The one is a commercialization of open access publishing dominated by the large corporate academic publishers that are pursuing open access on their own terms through the article processing charge (APC) and in relation to the acquisition and development of scholarly communication infrastructure. The other, older tradition, if still on a smaller scale, is one of cooperation and collaboration, growing out of the commons that the library has always represented, involving libraries, journals, and archives, as well as open source tool and platform development. There is some crossover between the two paths, between library consortia and corporate publishers, and this paper encourages librarians to consider how they might take advantage of the market for publishing services that the two paths are creating amid the move to universal open access as a scholarly norm.