and faculty scholarship that is made available in an open-access forum promises greater impact. Furthermore, the widespread adoption of open-access initiatives may yield substantial benefits even outside the directly involved university community. Most universities conceive of their missions as including substantial public service and public education components (indeed, for state-funded institutions, such mandates may be enacted as positive law),[1] and it is not difficult to situate efforts to make information more widely available within the broad domain of public service.[2]
In dealing with the open-access phenomenon, university libraries in particular confront imperatives that do not point uniformly in a single direction. To be sure, many librarians rightly see themselves as natural allies of the open-access movement and as well-positioned advocates for open-access policies because those policies best meet the needs of the library’s core constituencies.[3] On the other hand, the logic of open access enables disintermediation to occur simultaneously at many levels: just as open access may reduce the role and importance of publishers, so too may it diminish the historical status of libraries themselves as informational gatekeepers.[4] It is no simple task for libraries and librarians to balance the conflicting incentives presented by the open-access phenomenon, which makes some of the pro-access steps that libraries and universities have been taking recently all the more remarkable.
- ↑ See, e.g., Ohio Rev. Code Ann. § 3333.04(A), (E) (West 2009) (directing state board of regents to consider “the needs of the people,” among other criteria, in identifying the “public services which should be offered” by state-supported higher education institutions).
- ↑ See Willinsky, supra note 8, at 65, 227–32 (arguing for establishment of open-access publishing and archiving cooperative based partly on fulfillment of participating institutions’ public service mandates).
- ↑ See, e.g., James G. Neal, A Lay Perspective on the Copyright Wars: A Report from the Trenches of the Section 108 Study Group, 32 Colum. J.L . & Arts 193, 194 (2008) (“Universities and libraries are committed to openness—general and barrier-free access to information framed by the rhetoric of open source, open standards, open archives and open knowledge.”); id. at 197–98 (discussing principles and policies developed by library community, several of which involve greater access to information).
- ↑ See id. at 194 (noting Professor Clayton Christiansen’s definition of “disruptive technologies” that “enable[] a larger population of less skilled people to do the things that historically only an expert could do”) (footnote omitted). On the complex pattern of incentives that libraries may face to limit free access to digital collections, see Guy Pessach, The Role of Libraries in A2K: Taking Stock and Looking Ahead, 2007 Mich. St. L. Rev. 257, 261–62 (2007). The possibility that mass digitization projects may threaten adverse effects on the operation of libraries is an important factor behind the equivocal stance the library community has adopted towards the proposed settlement of the ongoing Google Book Search copyright litigation. See, e.g., Supplemental Library Association Comments on the Proposed Settlement, Authors Guild, Inc. v. Google Inc., No. 05-CV-8136-DC (S.D.N.Y.), at http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/library-associations-supp-filing-sept-2-09.pdf.
