Thinking Differently About the Money: A First Step Toward the Open Scholarly Commons

Abstract

This article argues the academic libraries need to move towards creating, with other organizations involved in scholarship and cultural heritage, an open scholarly commons. At the present time, academic library’s ability to do so is hampered by their standard approach to budgeting, particularly the way collection budgets are presented. A strategy for moving towards an open scholarly commons is presented and a way of structuring the collections portion of the library’s budget to make progress toward this goal visible is suggested.