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Abstract
As e-books emerge into the public consciousness, "open access" (a concept already familiar to scholarly publishers and academic libraries), will play an increasing role for all sorts of publishers and libraries. This chapter of The No Shelf Required Guide to E-book Purchasing discusses the meaning of open access in the context of e-books, the ways open access e-books can be supported, and the roles that open access e-books will play in libraries and in our society.
The Open Access "Movement"
Authors write and publish because they want to be read. Many authors also want to earn a living from their writing, but for some, income from publishing is not an important consideration. Some authors, particularly academics, publish because of the status, prestige, and professional advancement that accrue to authors of influential or groundbreaking works of scholarship. Academic publishers have historically taken advantage of these motivations to create journals and monographs consisting largely of works for which they pay minimal royalties, or more commonly, no royalties at all. In return, authors' works receive professional review, editing, and formatting. Works that are accepted get placement in widely circulated journals and monograph catalogs.
In the late 1970s and 1980s, academic libraries became acutely aware that an expansion of research activity had resulted in the growth of both the numbers of journals and the numbers of articles published in the journals. The combination of increased subscription prices and the number of journals needed to support research resulted in a so-called "serials crisis." Libraries were forced to cancel subscriptions. The reduction in circulation forced publishers to raise subscription prices further to make ends meet, and the resulting cycle of cancellations and price increases led to a fear that the whole system would collapse. If few libraries could afford subscriptions, fewer scholars would be able to read the articles, diminishing the attractiveness of publishing.
The advent of Web-based publications in the 1990s led many to believe that the solution to the serials crisis would be a shift of the scholarly publishing industry to so-called "open access" business models. Open access publications are those that can be read at no cost to the reader or the reader's institution. The traditional model of publishing supported by subscription fees was thus styled...