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 Social, political and behavioural issues

3.24. Openness and transparency. The technological developments outlined above have enabled the creation of a wide range of new services. Together they have brought a new age of abundance in the provision and availability of information resources. As information of all kinds has become more readily available, members of the research and academic community have become increasingly used to operating in a complex information environment of data, information and ideas; and they have changed their workflows accordingly. They have also come increasingly to expect that information and the services surrounding it are, and should be, available free at the point of use, at any time and wherever they are. Such notions are underpinned by the widespread availability of research content provided via academic libraries: researchers are often unaware of the routes through which content is provided to them, and the extent to which they rely on licences paid for by the library.

3.25. Some researchers, as well as librarians and others, have also become active in movements to promote access to data, information and other forms of content that people are free to use, re-use and redistribute without any legal, technological or other restriction. In this context, any restrictions on access are seen as barriers against realising the full potential of information whether formally published or not—as an essential component of social and economic welfare, and as the raw materials for the development of innovative tools and services.

3.26. Similar motivations underlie the Government’s commitment to openness and transparency in enhancing access to data generated by public bodies. It intends through its open data initiative to facilitate accountability; improve outcomes and productivity in key services through informed comparison; enhance social relationships; and drive dynamic economic growth by making data available for use in the market. Again, there are legal and ethical constraints, but such objectives are readily transferable to the research domain. As we noted earlier, Governments across the world are concerned to maximise the social and economic benefits that they gain through the investments they make in research; and it is therefore not surprising that they are increasingly interested in how to ensure that publicly-funded research findings are readily available not only across the research community itself, but more widely.

3.27. Disintermediation and the disruption of established roles. Over the past two decades, all intermediaries—publishers, aggregators, abstract and indexing services, libraries and so on—have had continually to re-assess and redefine their roles, in a world where authors can in principle communicate direct with their readers: for they can readily broadcast information direct via a blog or a website. Readers no longer have to visit a library to find material relevant to their work; for they can discover and gain access to relevant material whenever and wherever they have access to the internet. The central position that libraries once played in the research environment has now shifted to other sources.