Introduction

For centuries libraries have acquired and managed journals in order to provide their users with access to scholarly information. However, the price of journals has skyrocketed over the past few decades, making it increasingly difficult for libraries to maintain their journal subscription levels, which has affected users’ access to scholarly information. Research shows that while libraries and higher education institutions have continued to struggle to keep up with the rising cost of scholarly publications, especially journals, journal publishers have continued to maintain, if not increase, their profit margins.

Chapter 3 explained how the open access movement emerged in the early 1990s with the establishment of the open archive known as arXiv.org (formerly xxx.lanl.gov) in order to provide free access to research and scholarly information in high-energy physics. The Santa Fe Convention in 1999, in which the Open Archives Initiative was launched, and subsequently the BOAI in 2001, brought about a new era in scholarly communications promising free access to scholarly information. Two models for open access emerged:

• •the gold route, where the cost of publication would be recovered from authors and in return the resulting publications would be made available to everyone free of charge

• •the green route, where the published papers would be made available to everyone free of charge after a certain period of time (called the embargo period).

The green route is based on the principle of self-archiving where authors are required to submit a final copy of their paper to a repository that can be accessed by everyone free of charge.

The overall goal of both routes to open access is to facilitate free access to scholarly information. However, this very mission of the open access initiatives is bound to bring forth a paradigm shift in the ways people access and use information, and in some cases how scholarly information is published. This in turn will significantly inf luence the information industry and information services sector, and thus the overall sustainability of information systems and services.

The implications of the green and gold open access routes on the sustainability of information systems and services are discussed in this chapter: