Democratic Potential of New Models of Scholarship and the Crisis of Control

This paper frames the serials crisis as a loss of control over libraries’ collections and development budgets. While libraries have always had to contend with budget constraints, for many the rising cost of serials has become prohibitive, impeding on scholarship itself as librarians are forced to cut journal subscriptions. Open Access (OA) journals hold the potential to partially alleviate the crisis, but a lasting solution might lie in altering expectations of scholars. Our critique of the dissemination of scholarly research looks to both Marxian economic theory and later critical theory, but finds both inadequate for a pragmatic solution to the crisis; instead, we adopt Deweyan democratic theory to argue in favour of public scholarship aided by librarians and vetted by scholarly societies