Other worthwhile initiatives aimed at opening up scholarship to the public are emerging too. Thanks to the pioneering efforts of Robert Darnton—efforts at times opposed by fellow giants in the field such as Anthony Grafton—the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard has begun to put its members’ forthcoming scholarly articles on a public-domain website, managed by the newly established university library’s Office for Scholarly Communications. The Association of College and Research Libraries is searching for solutions to the periodicals crisis. The National Institutes of Health, which direct some $29 billion per year for biomedical research, stipulate that their 325,000 or so grantees must publish their NIH-supported research in PubMedCentral. The UK’s largest biomedical research charity, the Wellcome Trust, encourages open access, and the seven UK Research Councils are “committed to the guiding principles that publicly funded research must be made available to the public and remain accessible for future generations.” Dutch universities are pioneers in this field, not least in how they cooperate with each other. Physicists have run an open-access pre-print archive for years, first at Los Alamos and now at Cornell. There is the Public Library of Science, the Open Knowledge Commons, OpenCourseWare, the Open Content Alliance, the Internet Archive, Creative Commons, the Budapest Open Access Initiative, and so on.

The great libraries of the West understand that they can no longer compete against each other as to who can warehouse the most treasures. But if the collectivities of libraries are to remain the guardians of our patrimony, as they must, how do they divide that task between themselves? Increasingly (and encouragingly), they agree that stewardship must be joint, cross-unit, and complementary—a mash-up, even. Innovations and ideas abound, such as joint rather than parallel collecting of duplicative materials, strengthening the Centre for Research Libraries and other membership organizations, inter-library loan services, “joint-view” union catalogues, common licenses and joint negotiations for e-resources, coordinated collection developments and storage protocols, etc. These are matters of electronic knowledge management, and their operations are contested, via uneasy and shifting alliances between IT support and library staff. And critical questions of governance remain. How does one manage outsourcing, leases, and rents, while still ensuring permanent access to permanent content? In a mash-up, who takes what responsibility for materials being captured, curated, preserved, ordered, and delivered? Who plants the flag, asserting that we are here for centuries to come?

Yes, there are worthwhile initiatives to make scholarship public. But wider and deeper collective action is needed. We need a greater sense of urgency. We need more alliances, outreach and advocacy work. We need to embrace the neo-Gutenbergian shift, this disaggregating and democratizing rupture of time and space, whose profound cultural significance and depth none of us have yet fully grasped.

Why not a legal nudge—a presumption of open access along the lines of presumed organ donor intent? Could copyright be revocable—a lease, rather than a sale? Could copyright be deemed to automatically lapse when it stops generating income? At the very least, shouldn't copyright have to be asserted and renewed, in order to remain in force? A more public-minded policy at the university presses would make a great difference, too. The presses could, for example, release their back lists into the public domain. Could university libraries be more imaginative? Could we make alumni lifelong members? Could the materials held by the open universities in England and Israel become, well, open? Could we develop pay-per-view portals into scholarly resources that are invoiced monthly and electronically? And in doing so could we, ahem, lower prices? The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, for example, optimistically charges $10 for a book review, and the average price for a JSTOR article—if you are lucky enough to find one the publisher is willing to sell—is approximately $17. Compare that to iTunes! Could we digitize out-of-copyright books on demand and for a small fee, so that members of the public could “liberate” their chosen books? Could university catalogues be turned into blogs? That is to say, could university members—or the public— add commentaries and hyperlinks? After all, views could be switched between catalogue-only, university-affiliate-commentary–only, and open commentary. And today’s filters remove defamatory or offensive comments. At the very least, if libraries are to continue in their traditional role, as reliable repositories of our cultural memories and collective knowledge—that is, if libraries are to become the spiders in the internet—their catalogues need to provide reliable URLs, backed by long-term maintenance policies and institutional guarantees. The alternative is to rely on Google’s search-engine algorithms, which is to say, on ephemeral beauty contests.