Open Access and Its Impact on the Future of the University Librarian

We are shifting from content ownership by individual libraries to joint provision of services on a larger scale, says Stephen Barr

With the publication of the Finch report earlier this year and the UK government's announcement to commit £10m to help make research findings freely available, there has been a gear shift towards a more rapid movement into an open access world for the publishing of scholarly information.

While there has been a lot of discussion around what that shift means for academic publishers, and there is now a lively dialogue between researchers and scholars in different disciplines, there seems to have been less discussion of what this shift means for libraries and librarians. Yet the move towards open access is a profound change for the whole infrastructure of scholarly communication, and is bound to have impacts on the library as it does on other parts of the process.

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[http://www.guardian.co.uk/higher-education-network/blog/2012/oct/25/open-access-university-library-impact]