As long as professors assign readings from scholarly journals, learning content will not be fully free if the journal literature is not free.
For the user (the student), the costs of accessing this learning content are non-trivial. The student pays these costs in the purchase of coursepacks, also known as sourcebooks. Coursepacks assemble readings from disparate sources, frequently including journal articles as a significant portion. Unlike a textbook, though, a coursepack is custom-assembled for each class. This gives a professor greater flexibility in selecting readings for her class, but this ability to change the contents of the coursepack destroys the resale market: nobody wants to buy an old coursepack with the wrong readings. Conversely, a student can often hope to recover 50% of the cost of textbooks in resale when the course is completed.
Who profits when students pay these access costs? The copy center or book store will receive a portion. Another portion may go to a rights licensing middleman, such as the Copyright Clearance Center 1. But most of the revenue will go to the article's copyright holder - which, as a rule, is the journal publisher, not the article's author.
Open access cuts out these middlemen: once peer review and editing have been performed, and the article has been published, the article is forever free to the world for educational use.
Other approaches to circumventing the middlemen will not prove as sustainable a solution as OA:
- Relying on fair use as legal grounds to distribute copies of the articles to students is a perilous position 2
- E-reserves are similarly problematic 3.
- “Virtual coursepacks,” which link to copies of the articles in electronic databases via the institution's library subscriptions, only shift the cost from students to libraries. At a time when libraries have struggled with surging serials costs4 (p. 198), this cannot be a sustainable solution, either.
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