Key Issue - Out of the shadows: the case for a national repository of open content

Looking back on the history of the open access (OA) movement in the UK from a library perspective, we can see that it has been a journey towards a not fully clear destination, motivated differently at different times, and yet nonetheless a journey undertaken with seriousness and a determination to see change. Working in the scholarly communications field back at the time of the Budapest Initiative in 2002, it seemed to me and to colleagues in other research university libraries throughout the UK that we had found the solution to the besetting problem of our new digital age, the accelerating rise in the cost of journals, or the ‘serials pricing crisis’. Librarians on both sides of the Atlantic soon became very familiar with early versions of this graph (Figure 1), produced by the Association of Research Libraries. It clearly shows the price of serials rising frighteningly and unsustainably, illustrating both apparent profiteering by the publishers concerned, and the prospect for libraries of having to make cancellations on a large scale.