Good Partners? Can Open Access Publishers and Librarians Find Meaningful Ways to Collaborate?

What should the relationship be between the purely Open Access publishers and librarians? Yes, in theory, among publishers these are publishers who are fully aligned with libraries to end the stranglehold which the traditional subscription publishers have on libraries. Yes, they are 100% attribution-only (CC-BY) publishers living up to the goals of Open Access (as described in the Budapest Open Access Initiative [BOAI]). But, are they just replacing over-priced subscriptions with over-priced APCs (Article Processing Charges)?

Since they don't have renewal revenue at risk they may not pay sufficient attention to usage and integration with library systems [KBART?, COUNTER?, etc.].

Since collection development librarians don't have to assign budget dollars to purchasing their content--maybe they don't need attention from librarians.

The big subscription journals collect just one payment a year, and with big bundles, just one payment to cover thousands of journals. Are Open Access publishers just replacing that with thousands of tiny payments either in article processing costs, or in membership schemes for individual researchers? What are some initiatives that these publishers are trying that can avoid having the costs of publishing being invoiced to individual authors?

Can these publishers, aligned as they are with libraries on the defects in the subscription system, be good partners with librarians in areas such as:

• Open Science

• Pre-print Servers

• Integration with Open Repositories

• Open Monograph publishing

• O.E.R.

• Library Publishing

• Conference hosting

Is there more that they can do to effectively integrate with Library systems and processes?

A panel of purely Open Access publishers and librarians brainstorm these and other questions affecting how the pure Open Access publishers and librarians might collaborate more effectively.