Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
under the aegis of the journal. But it is difficult to see what would be
gained by such an arrangement, since it is unlikely that every article
published would be of sufficient interest to justify purchase. Much
better would be to buy nothing until one had seen what was on offer,
and then to buy only what was needed. Libraries could still act as
brokers, making the per-article payment on behalf of the patron, who
need never know that the desired article was not part of the library's
'collection' to begin with.
There is no reason why a system such as this could not work equally
well for electronic books - and, with certain modifications, even for
printed ones.
Evaluating and selecting resources in a mixed economic
environment
The world of scholarly information is currently in a state of wild flux
and confusion. The scholarly journal has been a fundamental tool of
scholarship for centuries; however, the pricing crisis, a world economic
meltdown and the OA insurgency have combined to make it very
unclear in what form the traditional journal will endure. The scholarly
monograph is, if anything, an even more venerable and basic scholarly
commodity, and yet research libraries everywhere are seeing dramatic
declines in their use, while the GBS project has created a massive online
research library that is fully searchable by anyone with internet access.
It is no longer clear to publishers to what degree access to information
can still be sold to end-users at all.
One thing that GBS illustrates is that free/fee is no longer a true
dichotomy. When the full text is searchable, and relevant (even if brief)
passages are available for reading - and thus for citing - it may not
matter that the entire document is not freely available for copying or
download. This is not to say that the difference no longer matters, only
that the line that separates 'free' from 'fee' is now quite a bit blurrier
than it once was, and is likely to become more so.
This points to another thing that GBS makes clear, perhaps for the
first time: the degree to which books in research libraries are used as
databases rather than as documents for extended reading. This is not
truly surprising - anyone who wrote research papers in college will
recall the large numbers of books that he searched and consulted and
