Introduction

The scholarly publishing industry has witnessed considerable pressures to change during the past decade – for it to adapt to the many external developments which make dissemination of education and scholarship more relevant in an age in which authors and researchers are coming to terms with the potentials offered by the internet, by new forms of social collaboration and by new needs for information in different formats, amongst others.

One such change is in the business models which are becoming more relevant as external developments find traction within scholarship. One of the key drivers for change is that many of the external pressures are geared around ‘openness’. The open source initiatives within the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) industry at large are influencing the needs and requirements of academics and researchers – there is a growing support for openness, transparency, interactivity and free access within and between the constituents or traditional stakeholders of the scholarly information industry. These are new and are at odds with some of the traditions governing scholarly communication in the past.

Open source initiatives have manifest themselves in the rise of so-called ‘open access’ (OA). This latter is not a single or even unified movement. There are a number of routes being considered for open access, as explored later in this chapter, and it is a reflection of the novelty of this development that the various routes are not always operating in harmony.

The net effect, nevertheless, is that a growing portion of scholarly, formally published literature is appearing as open access. Instead of librarians having to pay to access the results of research work, the ‘toll-based’ access system (TA), some 20% of the formal published literature, is now available for free to the library (OA). This has the potential to change the acquisitions budget of libraries considerably. It also has the potential to change the functions performed within the library to support and accommodate open access.

Knowledge workers

Why is open access so important? It faces up to the need to reach beyond the research library's clientele, into the professional, small and medium enterprise (SME) and ‘amateur scientist’ communities which have hitherto been denied access because of the prevailing toll-based subscription system. These communities have been largely excluded from the research results generated behind academic garden walls.