Page:Crowdsourcing and Open Access.djvu/9

 and faculty scholarship that is made available in an open-access forum promises greater impact. Furthermore, the widespread adoption of open-access initiatives may yield substantial benefits even outside the directly involved university community. Most universities conceive of their missions as including substantial public service and public education components (indeed, for state-funded institutions, such mandates may be enacted as positive law), and it is not difficult to situate efforts to make information more widely available within the broad domain of public service.

In dealing with the open-access phenomenon, university libraries in particular confront imperatives that do not point uniformly in a single direction. To be sure, many librarians rightly see themselves as natural allies of the open-access movement and as well-positioned advocates for open-access policies because those policies best meet the needs of the library’s core constituencies. On the other hand, the logic of open access enables disintermediation to occur simultaneously at many levels: just as open access may reduce the role and importance of publishers, so too may it diminish the historical status of libraries themselves as informational gatekeepers. It is no simple task for libraries and librarians to balance the conflicting incentives presented by the open-access phenomenon, which makes some of the pro-access steps that libraries and universities have been taking recently all the more remarkable.