The "Open Movement" in research scholarship - What is it and what does it mean?

I am not going to speak about information technology (IT) today – others will. That is not to say that it is not a key driver of the change in the information environment, a change that will demand that we adapt curricula to meet new educational needs. Instead I want to focus on an important socio-cultural “force” that I believe will, as much as technology, create a transformation in scholarly communications and will have ramifications throughout information organizations, particularly those closely allied to teaching, research and discovery. This force is open access (OA). I believe to ignore OA is to ignore an extremely important and well established movement that is disruptive for much of what information professionals do today as well as what iSchools do to educate for this work. But how do we think about OA and the long-term impact that it might have? My, perhaps, glib answer is that we use scenario thinking. This is relatively easy to do since scenario methodology is designed precisely to target dates as far in the future as 2050 – nearly four decades from now. In simplest terms, we think about a future based on the premise that all of the problems that seem so large today will be solved. That is not to say that there will be no new problems. So, we can frame 2050 by enunciating conditions that will be totally different from those that exist today. Like others, I am focused on the context within which I work – the academy. This is a quintessentially information-driven enterprise, if there ever was one, for all its core activities – research, teaching, learning, and knowledge creation. Most important, the academy is dependent on a system of scholarly communication that has evolved by accretion since the last quarter of the nineteenth century. I am positing, first, that this system – built on old budget models and print technologies – is broken and that it will be replaced by a completely different system four decades from now – one that springs out of the current OA movement. Furthermore, because the current structure of scholarly communication has so palpably defined what libraries are, it follows that libraries and – more to the point today – education for librarianship and other information professions will be unrecognizable. In this paper, I have attempted to outline evidence for the forces at work that are indicators of the increasing momentum of OA and