openpolitics.com

According to statistics furnished by the American Library Association for 2012, academic libraries spent $2.8 billion on information resources, of which half was for electronic serial subscriptions. Stanford University pays $1.2 million for annual subscriptions to four hundred RELX journals, which contain a large number of articles written by its own faculty.

.. Of course, there is no escape from the costs of publishing journals. But nonprofit, professional associations, such as the American Historical Association, have demonstrated that the costs can be covered by publishing excellent work at reasonable prices. The problem concerns commercial journals that have a monopoly on the literature in specialized fields, and they can be combatted by competition—that is, the creation of open-access journals.

.. Libraries lend themselves to utopian fantasies. They can be places for combining endless, unexpected trains of thought, as in Alberto Manguel’s The Library at Night. They can also set off nightmares, as in “The Library of Babel,” a dystopian fantasy by Jorge Luis Borges, one of Manguel’s predecessors at the National Library of Argentina. Borges’s vision of a hopeless search for truth in an infinite world of books suggests the sense of helplessness that can overcome anyone lost in cyberspace.

.. Hayden’s main problem concerns copyright, which covers most books published after 1923 and all books published after 1964. An unknown number of books published between those dates are orphans—that is, books covered by copyrights whose owners, if they exist, cannot be identified, even by long and costly research. No one knows how many orphan books exist—probably hundreds of thousands, perhaps more than a million.