Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
coming developments that seem inevitable. Some of these have been
discussed in more detail above.
Open Access
The OA movement generated considerable momentum between 2005
and 2009, and will continue to grow in significance and influence.
What remains to be seen is whether and to what degree it will actually
displace traditional publication, or whether it will simply create a new
niche in the scholarly communication marketplace. Given the manifest
difficulty of incorporating OA practices into existing, traditional pub-
lishing models, it seems likely that the only way OA will displace the
traditional avenues of publication will be if tenure and promotion prac-
tices and standards change substantially. While that is likely to happen
eventually, it seems unlikely that it will happen within the next decade.
Commercial education/training programmes
Although it takes a great deal of specialized knowledge to teach upper-
division and graduate-level coursework in most scientific and technical
disciplines, it is by no means clear that such knowledge is needed to
teach introductory courses. It is very possible that introductory college
coursework will be taken over by entities (some of them commercial)
that are willing to administer it in a more efficient and results-oriented
manner than most colleges and universities can or wish to do; to some
degree this has happened already, particularly in the USA. To the degree
that this phenomenon grows, it will exert a mighty change on colleges
and universities, which will become even more specialized, and more
focused on research rather than on instruction. We should be on the
lookout for such developments now: economic crisis leads to more, not
less, demand for this kind of training and instruction, as members of the
workforce feel a greater need to sharpen and certify their skills and as
the opportunity cost of education drops.
Pricing implosion
The economic crisis is hastening the point at which libraries will be
required finally to deal in a strategic and programmatic way with the
