Academic libraries need to evolve to continue to meet the needs of their users in an open-access world, reports Sian Harris

Some snippets from this article:

"A big potential change for libraries will be the effect of OA on allocation of university budgets.."

.. still a strong culture of mistrust and misunderstanding about OA amongst researchers and that communicating with researchers and institutions about it will be an important function for libraries..."

"Managing metadata will be very important for good discoverability but functions such as metadata management and preservation are likely to be done on a web scale rather than on an institutional level, they noted. Libraries are also well placed to – and in many cases already do – manage institutional repositories...."

 " Value will be added by digitising and making available unique collections and libraries will increasingly need to work together and share functions and services...."

"While research librarians have been amongst the strongest advocates of OA models, the implications of these models for research libraries and their future role in supporting the research process are less well understood,..."