The 2.5% Commitment: 2.5% of Whom?

Abstract

David Lewis proposed that libraries should commit approximately 2.5% of their budgets toward the creation of open access infrastructure for publishing. Though one can question the exact number necessary to accomplish these goals, the principle is laudable. Yet, there is another challenge. Librarians should not only commit 2.5% of their own internal resources; they also need to commit themselves to building a community containing at least 2.5% of faculty (across all disciplines), academic administrators (such as deans and grant managers), research funders (like the NSF or the Gates Foundation), and perhaps even some publishers (University presses and other open access ventures). Why is this important? As a historian of scholarly communication, I can say that the system has always been in part about creating a community to disseminate research. The question of who should and who should not be in that community has evolved over time. In the 1840s, professional scholars sought to create exclusive domains including only a small number of people. One hundred years later with increasing government money, the public became a part of the community. Now, if librarians want to create a new scholarly communication system, it will be necessary to determine what community we want to build for the future, and how both 2.5% of our money and 2.5% of the community can come together to create that new system.