Breaking down the barriers

Considering all the benefits of more open sharing of research, why hasn’t change proceeded more rapidly? There are a number of factors that have slowed progress:

• Economies extrinsic to scholarship have developed around the sale and/or lease of journals and monographs, together with efforts to protect publishing revenues and profits.
• Many publishers perceive the need to rigorously defend ‘their’ intellectual property in the digital environment through licensing restrictions and new ‘technical protection’ schemes on the horizon could make matters even worse for information users.
• The culture of academe, with its “prestige economy”, has also put a damper on change. Promotion and tenure committees may not yet recognize the value of new forms of digital scholarship and many scholars are fearful that non-traditional publications “won’t count”.

As a result, the readership of journals and monographs today has not changed much from the past and may have even declined as a result of library funding constraints.

Despite the tremendous growth in library purchases of electronic resources, more than ever before researchers are requesting copies of materials their library doesn’t own.

The research process is too often slowed or degraded by usage restrictions that are a relic of another time, but promising changes are starting to emerge.