You Can’t Preserve What You Don’t Have—Or Can You? Libraries as Infrastructure for Perpetual Access to Intellectual Output

Since their existence, libraries have been responsible for preserving society’s records and intellectual output. This ancient and important role is under serious threat in the digital age. Even for scholarly journals, the issue of perpetual access has not been solved, other than by libraries buying access to archival materials. Recently, it became clear that the open access business model, with a focus on free access to new publications, introduces new problems for the archival role of libraries.