Iowa State’s Curtis Brandy, in an interview on the Opening the Future site:
Libraries have traditionally placed their scholarly communications and collections work in distinct organizational silos. This has meant, in many cases, that the values that inform a library’s work in scholarly communications do not actually inform the work done in collections. […] At Iowa State, we have just adopted a new collection and open strategies policy that centers our library’s values in our collection work. […] Aligning our scholarly communications work and values with collections helps a library to shift this spending from traditional collection procurement to open investing, which will help incentivize and support the transition to a more equitable scholarly publishing system.
This is indeed the rub: The scholarly comms librarian or office, in most U.S. libraries, is nowhere near the collections budget. The Iowa State policy is a promising first step, but what about a complete merger of the roles—so that scholarly communications and collections are served by the same, unified staff?