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CARL Brief for Open Access Engagement Strategy
May 2010
Document 11
The Rationale for Open Access
Open Access (OA) is a means of disseminating scholarly and scientific literature over the internet free of
charge to researchers and to anyone else who might benefit from accessing the results of publicly
funded research. Research libraries have lent their support to the open access movement as a way of
extending their mandates to preserve and provide access to the world’s knowledge, but have also seen
in it a viable solution to the problem of escalating journal subscription prices. From 1989 onwards the
average scientific journal price had steadily risen by 315 % by 2003. Prices have increased at a slower
rate in recent years, however, they continue to rise by about 9 % yearly 1 .
Libraries have been able to defray the costs of providing access to the corpus of scholarly journal
literature by transitioning more and more to an electronic access and archiving environment by way of
regional consortial journal content licensing arrangements or by purchasing much of the same electronic
content for perpetual institutional ownership. However, even the most financially endowed university
libraries cannot subscribe to all 24, 000 scholarly, scientific, technical, and medical journals that are
currently published. Faced with this problem, libraries must periodically cancel journal subscriptions in
order to allocate their limited acquisitions budgets to the journal content faculty and students at their
host institutions use most heavily. This is something which places students and researchers at a
disadvantage. Research is increasingly a multi‐disciplinary endeavor and it is not always easy to for
libraries to determine what content they can dispense with in the collections they manage. This is
problem for large institutions, but especially for libraries that support medium and smaller‐sized higher
learning institutions. The current global economic crisis that began in the fall of 2008 has added
impetus for libraries and Academia to consider bringing OA practices into the way they conduct their
business – especially in light of budgetary cutbacks or freezes.
But OA is not only about devising sustainable publishing and access models to research journal
literature. Researchers and librarians also see it as a means to repair a scholarly publishing system that,
although it has worked in the world of print‐based dissemination, drastically limits the possibilities
offered by the emerging networked research environment and the internet. If researchers cannot
always access parts of the current research literature in their fields they are missing information that is
potentially vital to their research, and the result is that the progress of scientific discovery is stalled.
Open Access levels the field for researchers everywhere, in terms of accessibility, giving scientific
literature the broadest possible dissemination so researchers can find it, interpret it, and build on it to
help solve problems and challenges society faces.
Recommendation:
The Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) recommends that all stakeholders in Higher
Education in Canada seriously explore how they can support Open Access by way of new publishing
initiatives, OA policies and institutional mandates.
1 Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook (OASIS) , Why librarians should be concerned with Open Access
http://www.openoasis.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=254&Itemid=256 , and Association
of Research Libraries, Monograph and Serial Expenditures in ARL Libraries, 1986 – 2003
http://www.arl.org/bm~doc/monser04.pdf
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