While it may require more personal effort from faculty, the reward is a unique opportunity to create a new model for publishing academic learning content that avoids the mistakes of the old system. Faculty can learn from their librarian colleagues, whose past experiences in managing scholarly communication offers a lesson in how not to structure a publishing model.
Here’s where things went wrong. For years faculty gave away (and in many cases continue to give away) their scholarly works to publishers who would edit and repackage the content and then sell it back, at hard-to-justify prices, to the same academic institutions that had produced it. Few faculty paid attention as the institution’s librarians financed the system by paying exorbitant journal subscription fees. Give away the intellectual capital of the institution; buy it back at unsustainable prices. An oversimplification, but that’s roughly how we got into this mess.