¹ A process re-design that ignores the well-being of key players may be successfully disruptive, but may end up breaking itself eventually. Think of how the demise of a traditional news agency by bloggers etc. may leave no reporting for them to filter and blog about. There may not have been “logic” in respecting the concerns of artists about how digital distribution might affect their rights, but to us at least, we would rather have them included in the solution.

² “The conclusion is clear, I think. As a society the USA must accept that dissemination costs are part of research costs. Publication is an overhead. Like universities and learned societies, scholarly communications must ultimately be public-sector funded whether through grants or tax breaks. They are a public good. Whether federal/state, or philanthropic research funders should pay for, mandate, and enforce open access…Self-archiving, or local archives, are not enough. When an online resource fails, it may become completely unavailable. Web technologies keep shifting, and smaller organizations may not be able to fund their web libraries in perpetuity.” (Rausing, 2012, p. 5–6).

³ “These days, many museum visitors arrive with smartphones and the assumption that they have an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of good photographs. Museum bans on picture-taking are practically unenforceable and are also obsolete.” (Solomon, 2013, p. SR5).

⁴ Within the Open Access movement, there are efforts such as GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) that work to make content open, including integrating institutional work with Wikipedia and Wikimedia (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM). [In the world of media – images, video, music – the level of release has its own issues (in the way that journal pages do not), since different manifestations are required for different uses – an image file may be perfectly sufficient for most normal users and uses, but a large format TIFF is needed for publishing. As cultural institutions have moved towards “opening up,” they have also had to define what sort of users and uses they will support.

⁵ “There are signs that the reins will be loosened. One example of the rumbling power of this brave new world came when New York’s Museum of Modern Art happened upon a guerilla iPod tour in their ranks in the spring of 2005, made by a professor for his students. In a fast-paced sequence of developments, MoMA reacted by making its audio content downloadable for free from its website, and then by the summer made its audio content free in the museum itself. If one professor can alter the IP policies of America’s most commercially ambitious museum, there are many more bottom-up surprises to come.” (Anderson, 2005).

⁶ As early as 1998, the AMICO members recognized (and sought to be helpful) in addressing the needs of scholars: “AMICO members will need to anticipate the kinds of further rights requests that The AMICO Library will generate. For example, we can assume that scholars are going to want to request permission for scholarly publication of works from the Library. AMICO members could consider streamlining this kind of request, through, for example, a common on-line form, that went to each Member for processing. The Rights Links in each member’s records are also critical to facilitating reproduction requests.” (AMICO, 1998).

⁷ See also, “Like the video distributers who had to finesse the divergent interests of studio and retailers, such mediators often found themselves straddling multiple social groups, renegotiating their identities based on their immediate context across the many strata between producer and consumer.” (Greenberg, 2008, p. 155).

⁸ Building the support for publishing into researchers’ costs has its own problems but it is deemed by those who do it to be a more cost-effective investment than supporting journal subscription fees. In these cases, universities and researchers would rather pay upfront than participate in a scholarly exchange where they do not trust their partners in the deals.

⁹ Rausing, a strong advocate for Open Access, recognizes that there will always be costs associated with supporting that access: “Open access archives have no income sources, and they, too, cost something. That something needs to be paid somehow. But it shouldn’t be paid as it is today. The institutional subscription model means university libraries pay for the promise that others – the general public and poorer institutions – will be banned from accessing the materials. And that ban is the profit.” (Rausing, 2012, p. 8).

¹⁰ Letter from Bob Meister, the President of the Council of UC Faculty Associations: “Students in my course will also realize that the business logic of ‘for free’ is that, once all the students of the world can get an ‘equivalent’ education, Coursera will be able to set a price for it. And that price will likely turn out to be much more than the world’s students currently pay for the for-profit training institutions that line the streets in the emerging markets.” CUCFA President Meister’s Open Letter to Coursera Founder Daphne Koller.