





































19

PLENARY  
SESSIONS

Reimagining the  
Academic Library
By David W. Lewis, Dean Emeritus, IUPUI University Library

© 2018 David W. Lewis. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

ABSTR ACT This paper is a summary with some added thoughts of 
the closing plenary address at the American Theological Library Asso-
ciation meeting in Indianapolis, Indiana on June 16, 2018. The talk 
explores issues of productivity in the library context and how librar-
ies need to explore, discover, and invent in order to remain vital. It 
also considers what has changed, most notably the unrelenting pace 
of increases in the capacity of computer technology as expressed in 
Moore’s Law. It considers the fundamental shift libraries need to make 
from an outside-in to an inside-out approach and how this requires 
investing in open content and infrastructure. Finally, a challenge was 
issued to the group to create the open scholarly commons for theology 
and religion.

INTRODUCTION

“That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets 
broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place.”1



20  ATL A 2018 PROCEEDINGS

I like to begin with this quote from Clay Shirky because I think it 
is important to understand that we cannot expect things in our world 
to go smoothly. We need to understand and accept that there will be 
broken parts that we have to live with as we search for new solutions. 
That is just the way it is going to be.

Today I will talk about:

 1. Productivity

 2. Exploring/Discover/Invent

 3. What has Changed?

 4. The Fundamental Shift

 5. Investing in Open

Finally, I will issue a challenge to you as a community.

PRODUCTIVITY

Paul Krugman, the Nobel laureate and New York Times columnist, 
famously said, “Productivity isn’t everything, but in the long run it is 
almost everything.”2 I start with productivity because I think that too 
often librarians, and many others in the academy, think that increas-
ing productivity is not possible. The thinking is that our work, like 
that of a string quartet, cannot be made more productive. You need 
four players to have a string quartet; you can’t do it with less. This is 
not simply a foolish argument, it is wrong. String quartets are now 
much more productive than they were a century ago before recorded 
music and more productive than even a decade ago before streaming 
music services. Libraries can and must become more productive if 
we are to survive.

Productivity is defined as the units of output divided by the units of 
input. In the library world this generally means the amount of infor-
mation that users get divided by the cost of the people and collections 
that go into providing that information. You get more productive by 
providing more information, or doing it at a lower cost, or both.

Here is an example that comes from my book, Reimagining the 
Academic Library.3 In the chart below I propose a materials budget 
based on changing strategies for providing documents to users: 
moving from the just-in-case strategy libraries have used in the past 
to a just-in-time strategy based on patron-driven-acquisitions book 



Plenary Sessions  21

purchasing and the substitution of article purchasing on-demand 
rather than subscriptions where this is the less expensive option. It 
also anticipates the growth of open access content and the library’s 
willingness to substitute this access for purchased content. The chart 
shows that even given conservative assumptions, the library’s mate-
rials budget can be maintained with only minimal increases even in 
the face of significant price increases for databases and journals. The 
library thus is more productive.

If we cannot become more productive, we will not be able to justify 
increased investments in our libraries, and without that investment 
our libraries will not be sustainable. So, we need to talk about produc-
tivity, and more importantly make our libraries more productive. We 
do this by acquiring better tools, by hiring and developing more skilled 
people, and by doing things in new and improved ways.

EXPLORE/DISCOVER/INVENT

Greg Satell has said, “Every business model fails eventually. It’s just 
a matter of time. Changes in technology, competitive landscape and 
customer preferences make that a near certainty. . . . Cutting costs, 
streamlining operations and increasing efficiency will only take it 
so far. . . . It’s a fairly simple equation. If you don’t explore, you won’t 
discover. If you don’t discover you won’t invent. And if you don’t invent, 
you will be disrupted.”4



22  ATL A 2018 PROCEEDINGS

I like this way of thinking for several reasons. First, it doesn’t 
mention committees or task forces. Second, it implies a bias towards 
action and a freedom for individuals to act on their own. In our librar-
ies, we need to try new things in small ways, fail quickly, and most 
importantly, learn from our failures. Too often in libraries we behave 
in exactly the opposite way. We are risk averse and fail to act without 
extensive conversations.

Let me cite one example of what this might look like. Heather 
Coates, the data services librarian at the IUPUI University Library, 
has an interest in research metrics. With some colleagues she created 
the Metrics Toolkit. The toolkit, as its website says, “is a resource for 
researchers and evaluators that provides guidance for demonstrating 
and evaluating claims of research impact. With the Toolkit you can 
quickly understand what a metric means, how it is calculated, and if 
it’s good match for your impact question.”5 As a result of her interest 
in this topic and her work in it, Heather got a reputation on campus as 
the person for faculty to talk to to help demonstrate research impact 
in P&T dossiers. Out of this is growing a new and highly valued library 
service as she shares her knowledge and approach with her library 
colleagues.

WHAT HAS CHANGED?

When we look at the two page images below they look similar. 



Plenary Sessions  23

The one on the left is handwritten manuscript circa 1150.6 The 
one on the right is from the Gutenberg Bible.7 They look very similar, 
and that is often what big changes look like in the beginning. They are 
hard to see, as initially the new often mimics the old. 

Though if we were actually holding these two pages we would feel 
that they are quite different. One is vellum and one is paper. The fun 
fact for the day is that it took 200 to 225 hides from goats or sheep to 
make a vellum Bible.8 Without paper, printing would have been much 
less important. 

But over the next 200 years, printing brought changes that could 
never have been anticipated. Here are some examples:

 1.  In 1494, Fra Luca Bartolomeo de Pacioli published Summa de 
Arithmetica, Geometria, Proportioni et Proportionalita (Summary 
of Arithmetic, Geometry, Proportions and Proportionality), which, 
among other things, introduced the fundamentals of accounting 
and bookkeeping. The work was translated and widely distrib-
uted across Europe and created a common system that made 
doing business easier and more efficient across the continent.

 2.  In 1522, Martin Luther published his German translation of 
the New Testament and in 1534 his translation of the full Bible. 
It was followed by translations in many other languages. This 
broke the Catholic Church’s monopoly control of the word of God 
and resulted in extensive disruption of religion and politics.

 3.  In 1605, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra published the first 
volume of Don Quixote. It is generally considered the first novel. 
This created a greatly expanded popular culture. 

 4.  The first scholarly journal, the Philosphical Transactions of the 
Royal Society, was published in 1665. Without printed journals, 
science as we know it could not exist.

Of course, the technology that is now driving change is the computer. 
It might not be true that the first conversation about computers in the 
library was in the 1957 movie Desk Set, but I like to think so, because 
Katharine Hepburn facing down EMERAC as the feistiest librarian of 
the twentieth century is a wonderful image. It is probably not true, but 
that sixty years ago computerizing a library could be the plot driver in 
a major motion picture tells us how long we have been at this.



24  ATL A 2018 PROCEEDINGS

When we think about computing and how it is changing our world, 
we tend to think about Moore’s Law that states that the number of 
transistors that can be put onto a computer chip doubles every eigh-
teen months. Moore’s Law is often generalized across other aspects 
of computing, and with some minor variations it has held true since 
Gordon Moore, then the director of research and development at Fair-
child Semiconductor, proposed it in 1965. It is usually shown in visual 
form in a chart like the one below.9

There are two things about Moore’s Law that I think it is important 
for us to understand. The first is that Moore’s Law is part of a larger 
phenomenon. Ray Kurzweil has looked at earlier digital technolo-
gies, and when he did so, it became clear that Moore’s Law is really the 
continuation of a trend that began with the first use of electromechani-
cal digital technologies, like punched cards, in the late nineteenth 
century.10 So the first important lesson is that the important change 
was not about transistors on silicon, rather it was about representing 
information with ones and zeros so that machines could use it. This 
began over 125 years ago. 

The second important thing about Moore’s Law is that we tend not 
to really understand what is really happening. We look at the chart and 



Plenary Sessions  25

are not overly concerned. It is a 
nice, gentle 45-degree angle. It is 
not too scary. What we neglect to 
notice is that the vertical axis is a 
log scale. If Moore’s Law is plotted 
on a graph using a normal scale it 
looks quite different. It looks like 
the chart to the right.11

And the trend line contin-
ues to accelerate and go nearly 
to vertical. The math of Moore’s 
Law is really simple: doubling 
every eighteen months means 
that computing capacity increases one hundred times in a decade. 

But this might understate the extent of the change. The chart below 
is from the National Institutes of Health and shows the decrease in 
the cost of sequencing a human genome.12 Note that this chart is on a 
log scale. The white line is the price decrease we would expect from 
improvements based on Moore’s Law. We would have expected a 
decline in the price of two orders of magnitude. In fact, the change 
was five orders of magnitude from nearly $100 million in 2001 to 



26  ATL A 2018 PROCEEDINGS

about $1,000 in 2015. If we translate this into “library units,” this is 
the difference between building a university library and purchasing 
a dozen books.

One of the results of this relentless increase in the capacity of tech-
nology is that computers have been able to accomplish things that 
were once thought to be exclusively human. In 1997, the world’s best 
chess player, Garry Kasparov, was defeated by IBM’s Deep Blue. In 
2011, IBM’s Watson defeated Jeopardy champions Brad Rutter and Ken 
Jennings. In a TED Talk discussing his loss, Jennings said, “I felt like 
quiz show contestant was now the first job that had become obsolete 
under the new regime of thinking computers.”13 In 2016, Go, arguably 
our most complex game, fell as Lee Se-dol was defeated by AlphaGo. 

In the library realm there is Meta, a machine learning system that 
has ingested all of the biomedical literature on its way to being a new 
type of search engine. The developers claim that, “Meta estimates 
the future citation count and impact of a manuscript, with a speed, 
accuracy, and consistency that far exceed human ability. Large-scale 
trials conducted by Meta in partnership with industry demonstrated 
that Bibliometric Intelligence out-performed tens of thousands of 
human editors by a factor 2.5x at predicting article-level impact for 
new manuscripts, prior to publication.”14 This tells us both that the 
peer review system is not nearly as good as we sometime say it is and 
that machine systems can have a significant impact when applied to 
scholarly communication. One can easily imagine Meta providing 
at least initial screening of manuscripts. I can also see it being used 
to provide metrics that can’t be worse than journal impact factors. 
Fortunately for us, Meta was acquired by the Chan Zuckerberg Initia-
tive and not Elsevier.

So, how should we think about this? One way is to ask the economic 
question posed by Ajay Agrawal, who says, “When looking at arti-
ficial intelligence from the perspective of economics, we ask the 
same, single question that we ask with any technology: What does it 
reduce the cost of?”15 Artificial intelligence, says Agrawal, reduces 
the price of prediction. Computing, Agrawal says, reduces the price 
of arithmetic. Because the price of arithmetic has decreased at the 
rate of Moore’s Law, we can now do things with arithmetic that don’t 
seem at all like arithmetic problems—like music or art. As predic-
tion gets cheap, we can do things with prediction that don’t seem like 



Plenary Sessions  27

prediction problems, like driving. In our world, Google reduces the 
price of searching, the Web reduces the price of publishing. As Clay 
Shirky has said, “It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a 
publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves—the 
incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something 
available to the public—has stopped being a problem.”16 Amazon has 
reduced the cost and time needed to acquire physical objects, most 
importantly for us, books.

Another way of thinking about the nature of the change is to 
consider the nature of digital documents on the network. Network-
based digital documents have the following characteristics:

 1. A copy can be instantaneously delivered anywhere in the world

 2. A copy is the same as the original

 3. A copy can be made at zero marginal cost

That is to say, as Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson do, they should 
be, “Free, Perfect and Instant.”17 This is how it should be, but as we all 
know this is not how it is, at least for scholarly information. For schol-
arly information, it is none of these things.

This is the final thing that has changed. This change is not about 
technology, rather it is about economics. Quite simply, the economics 
of scholarly communication no longer works. Here are the numbers: 
“If gasoline had increased in price at the same rate as Chemistry and 
Physics Journals from 1975 to 2015, it would cost $30.61 a gallon.”18 

This took place during a period where publication moved from paper 
to digital, and the cost of paper and postage vanished, and Moore’s 
Law should have driven down price for technology. The reason this 
didn’t happen is simple. Scholarly journals are a monopoly good, and 
publishers, especially the large for-profit publishers, are extracting 
large monopoly rents. Elsevier’s profit margin has consistently been 
35% or a bit more.  The five top publishers account for over 50% of the 
articles in the sciences and over 70% in the social sciences.20

Scholarly communication is, like the research it reports, a public 
good. As such, it requires subsidy to be produced in a way that best 
serves society at large. When 35% of this subsidy is sucked out of the 
system to pay dividends to shareholders, it become unsustainable. 
This is the system we have today.



28  ATL A 2018 PROCEEDINGS

In addition, the scholarly monograph is in trouble. This is how 
most scholarly monographs work. First, the author spends two or 
three years writing the manuscript. Then the scholarly press spends 
$15,000 to $40,000 publishing the book. The book sells five hundred 
copies. Half of the books are purchased by libraries and only half of 
the library copies ever circulate. The author is rewarded based on the 
reputation of the press with whom they published, not on whether 
the book is ever read. There are a number of efforts to find new ways 
of supporting the scholarly monograph, but no one has yet found the 
solution. My guess is that the only solution is a lower quality digital 
product at a significantly reduced price, covered by the author or her 
or his institution, that can be made open access. This approach seems 
unlikely to be attractive to either scholars or the current academic 
press editors.

FUNDAMENTAL SHIFT

I want to argue that in the next decade or so there will be a funda-
mental shift in what libraries do. They will shift from a primary focus 
on bringing content from the world to their campuses to a focus on 
capturing the content created on or of interest to their campuses, 
making it discoverable and accessible, and preserving it. This is a 
change that Lorcan Dempsey has called moving from an outside-in 
to an inside-out library.21 Jean-Claude Guédon very nicely describes 
it this way:

In the end, libraries can point out the fact that their future 
role actually points in two, apparently opposite, yet deeply 
complementary directions: on the one hand, they plunge 
deeply into the local production scenes since they aim at 
systematically sweeping, storing, preserving, and curating all 
that is produced in their hosting institution; at the same time, 
the libraries, with their sister institutions, are involved in the 
task of ensuring a vibrant knowledge-nurturing life for their 
documents: they will circulate, be discoverable, be interop-
erable, be evaluated, etc. With the first function, each library 
ensures it safe and strong function within its host institution; 
with the second function, the libraries connect to bring the 
knowledge infrastructure that we all really need.22



Plenary Sessions  29

In a print world, the outside-in strategy made sense because, unless 
content was close at hand, it was expensive and time consuming to get 
it. This strategy carried over to the early digital era. This was a library 
that was complicated to use and subject to congestion. The inside-out 
library takes advantage of the nature of digital content and, by manag-
ing and preserving local content for the world, the library serves as 
a node on the network and part of the open scholarly commons. If 
implemented at scale across many educational and cultural heritage 
institutions, scholarly societies, and government agencies, all of whom 
have as part of their core missions to make knowledge available to their 
communities, this creates the open scholarly commons, a rich universe 
of the world’s knowledge available to everyone.

INVESTING IN OPEN

This brings me to my final point. We, as the academic library commu-
nity, need to invest in open content and the tools to find, use, and 
preserve it. This needs to become a priority for all of us.

There are three fundamental truths that we need to understand.

Fundamental Truth #1: There is no sustainable path to an 
open scholarly commons without sustained and substan-
tial investment from academic libraries. We need to invest in 
both infrastructure and content.

Fundamental Truth #2: Much of this investment will need to be 
made collectively. The library community will have to create 
new capacities and new institutions. The library community 
is not good at this. We have a collective action problem. John 
Wenzler puts the problem this way: “Although it is likely that 
university libraries could develop a more efficient system of 
scholarly communication if they were to redeploy their collec-
tive subscription budgets, each individual library—when it 
decides how to spend its own little piece of that huge pie—has 
little incentive to redirect its own expenditures. . . . Unfor-
tunately, if every librarian waits for every other librarian to 
make the investments necessary to develop a sustainable 
system of Gold OA publishing, it may never happen.”23

Fundamental Truth #3: If we do not create the open scholarly 
commons, Elsevier, Springer, and Wiley will own the scholarly 



30  ATL A 2018 PROCEEDINGS

record and continue to exploit the academy. What should be a 
public good will be used for private gain. If you doubt that this 
is the case, consider the illustration below. It shows all of the 
companies Elsevier has acquired that manage different parts 
of the research process.24

In response to the Elsevier acquisition of Bepress last summer, I 
suggested that all academic libraries need to contribute 2.5% of their 
total budgets to support the common infrastructure that is needed 
to support the open scholarly commons.25 I arrived at this number 
by estimating what is would take for U.S. academic libraries to annu-
ally raise that amount of money Elsevier reportedly paid for Bepress, 
which the Financial Times said was $115 million.26 I assumed that 
since the budgets of U.S. academic libraries total about $7 billion27, 
2.5% would be $175 million and if 60% of it could be collected that 
would be $105 million, which was close enough.

With several colleagues, I have begun investigating whether my 
proposal might actually be possible. It turns out that many, but not 
nearly all, large libraries already invest 2.5% in open projects, but 
most smaller institutions do not. It also turns out, unsurprisingly, 
that there is much complexity. Nonetheless, I have been encouraged 
by the conversation and am optimistic. Organizing investment on the 
scale required will be difficult, but I believe our community can invest 
at the level that is required.



Plenary Sessions  31

CHALLENGE

This leads to my challenge to you. You need to create the open schol-
arly commons for theology and religion.

In doing so, I think you have some clear advantages. 
First, the American Theological Library Association, your profes-

sional society, already has stated core values and strategic goals in 
line with this. The ATLA Strategic Plan’s second core value is, “Widest 
possible access to relevant information and ideas,” and the second 
strategic goal is, “ATLA has a solid reputation as a facilitator of open 
access publishing in the study of religion and theology.”28 As a commu-
nity, you have already declared that open access to the work produced 
at your institutions is part of your core mission. Importantly, you serve 
a large practice community, both clergy and laity. This work also has a 
large audience in countries without well-resourced educational insti-
tutions. Arguing for the resources to make this work available to these 
currently unserved groups might not be a stretch. The leaders of your 
institutions are likely to espouse goals that would be consistent with 
an open scholarly commons, though they are unlikely to have thought 
about the problem and the solutions in quite this way.

Second, most of the money that supports the theological and reli-
gious studies literature and its discovery is already in your budgets, 
and you already pay to support access to this literature and its preser-
vation. As a community, you have today enough money to create the 
infrastructure necessary. You just have to decide to spend in differently.

Third, ATLA is a significant player in publication and indexing for 
the discipline. The various databases created by ATLA are the core 
resources for the field. For the fiscal year 2016-17, the income ATLA 
generated from these subscription databases was about $6.5 million 
or about 94% of the association’s revenue.29 The association’s primary 
business relationship is with EBSCO, which is a much better place 
to be than if this relationship were with Elsevier. Consistent with 
its stated values, ATLA has made some beginnings in open access 
publishing. While remaking ATLA’s economic model and business 
strategy from one based on subscription income to one that supports 
the open scholarly commons will undoubtedly be very challenging, 
the fact that so much of the content and infrastructure runs through 
ATLA, which is ultimately a community-controlled organization, puts 
you in a better position than most other fields.



32  ATL A 2018 PROCEEDINGS

Fourth, the large commercial publishers probably don’t care about 
your field. They are after the big bucks, and you are small potatoes. 
This means that you can create without interference in a way that 
most other fields cannot. It is often the case that change comes from 
the periphery. Your field is a niche at the periphery; in this case, this 
is a good thing. You should use your position to your advantage, and 
create a model for the rest of us.

Finally, since we are in Indiana, home of the Lilly Endowment, I 
would suggest you might have access to resources that are not avail-
able to every field.

I would suggest when you leave today that you take the following 
to-do list with you:

 1. Imagine the open scholarly commons for theology and religion.

 2. Make a plan.

 3.  Create the incentives and the organizational capacity to solve 
the collective action problem.

 4.  Make the collective investments to build the common infrastruc-
ture that is required.

When you get back home, begin to work the list. 
As a community, you should say to yourselves, “Let’s DO This.”

NOTES

1 Clay Shirky, “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable,” 
March 2009, http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspa-
pers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/.

2 Paul Krugman in The Age of Diminished Expectations (1990; 
1994; 1997) from Wikiquote, https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/
Paul_Krugman#The_Age_of_Diminished_Expectations_
(1990;_1994;_1997).

3 David W. Lewis, “Step Five: Making the Money Work,” 139 in 
Reimagining the Academic Library (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Little-
field, 2016), 125-39.

4 Greg Satell, “How GE Got Disrupted,” Digital Tonto, April 1, 2018, 
https://www.digitaltonto.com/2018/how-ge-got-disrupted/

5 Metrics Toolkit, http://www.metrics-toolkit.org.
6 Vulgate Bible France. Circa 1150. 10 ½ x 7 ¼ inches. Vellum, 

http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Paul_Krugman#The_Age_of_Diminished_Expectations_(1990;_1994;_1997)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Paul_Krugman#The_Age_of_Diminished_Expectations_(1990;_1994;_1997)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Paul_Krugman#The_Age_of_Diminished_Expectations_(1990;_1994;_1997)
https://www.digitaltonto.com/2018/how-ge-got-disrupted/
http://www.metrics-toolkit.org


Plenary Sessions  33

written in well-executed transitional 12th century Gothic book 
hand. From the Graduate Theological Union Library Collection, 
http://www.gtuarchives.org/KJV/before-kjv-ms.html.

7 “Gutenberg Bible,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Gutenberg_Bible. First page of the first volume: The Epistle of St. 
Jerome from the University of Texas copy.

8 Sarah E. Bond, “Sacrificial Lambs: Livestock, Book Costs, and the 
Premodern Parchment Trade,” History from Below, April 4, 2016, 
https://sarahemilybond.com/2016/04/04/sacrificial-lambs-live-
stock-book-costs-and-the-premodern-parchment-trade/.

9 “Moore’s Law Transistor Count– 1971-2016.png,” Our 
World in Data, January 2018, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
File:Moore%27s_Law_Transistor_Count_1971-2016.png.

10 Raymond Kurzweil, Kurzweil Accelerating Intelli-
gence, http://www.kurzweilai.net/exponential-growth-of-
computing#!prettyPhoto.

11 This chart is a rough extraction of the data from the Our World in 
Data chart above.

12 “DNA Sequencing Costs: Data from the NHGRI Genome 
Sequencing Program (GSP),” https://www.genome.
gov/27541954/dna-sequencing-costs-data/

13 Ken Jennings, “Watson, Jeopardy and Me, the Obsolete Know-It-
All,” TEDxSeattleU, March 13, 2014, https://www.ted.com/talks/
ken_jennings_watson_jeopardy_and_me_the_obsolete_know_
it_all.

14 Aries Marketing, “Artificial Intelligence Integration Allows 
Publishers a First Look at Meta Bibliometric Intelligence,” 
October 17, 2016, https://www.ariessys.com/views-press/
press-releases/artificial-intelligence-integration-allows-
publishers-first-look-meta-bibliometric-intelligence/.

15 Ajay Agrawal, “The economics of artificial intelligence,” 
McKinsey Quarterly (April 2018), https://www.mckinsey.com/
business-functions/mckinsey-analytics/our-insights/the-
economics-of-artificial-intelligence.

16 Clay Shirky, “Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable,” 
March 2009, http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspa-
pers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/.

http://www.gtuarchives.org/KJV/before-kjv-ms.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutenberg_Bible
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gutenberg_Bible
https://sarahemilybond.com/2016/04/04/sacrificial-lambs-livestock-book-costs-and-the-premodern-parchment-trade/
https://sarahemilybond.com/2016/04/04/sacrificial-lambs-livestock-book-costs-and-the-premodern-parchment-trade/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Moore%27s_Law_Transistor_Count_1971-2016.png
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Moore%27s_Law_Transistor_Count_1971-2016.png
http://www.kurzweilai.net/exponential-growth-of-computing#!prettyPhoto
http://www.kurzweilai.net/exponential-growth-of-computing#!prettyPhoto
https://www.genome.gov/27541954/dna-sequencing-costs-data/
https://www.genome.gov/27541954/dna-sequencing-costs-data/
https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_jennings_watson_jeopardy_and_me_the_obsolete_know_it_all
https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_jennings_watson_jeopardy_and_me_the_obsolete_know_it_all
https://www.ted.com/talks/ken_jennings_watson_jeopardy_and_me_the_obsolete_know_it_all
https://www.ariessys.com/views-press/press-releases/artificial-intelligence-integration-allows-publishers-first-look-meta-bibliometric-intelligence/
https://www.ariessys.com/views-press/press-releases/artificial-intelligence-integration-allows-publishers-first-look-meta-bibliometric-intelligence/
https://www.ariessys.com/views-press/press-releases/artificial-intelligence-integration-allows-publishers-first-look-meta-bibliometric-intelligence/
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/


34  ATL A 2018 PROCEEDINGS

17 Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson, Machine, Platform, Crowd: 
Harnessing Our Digital Future (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & 
Company, 2017), 135-37.

18 Jerry D. Odell, “The Lewis Journals-to-Gas-Price Inflation 
Index,” Chemistry and Physics 2015, March 2016, http://doi.
org/10.6084/m9.figshare.3081787.v1.

19 David Matthews, “Elsevier’s profits swell to more than £900 
million,” Times Higher Education, February 20, 2018, https://
www.timeshighereducation.com/news/elseviers-profits-swell-
more-ps900-million and Stephen Buranyi, “Is the Staggeringly 
Profitable Business of Scientific Publishing Bad for Science,” 
The Guardian, June 27, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/
science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-
bad-for-science.

20 Vincent Larivière, Stefanie Haustein and Phillippe Mongeon, 
“The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era,” PLOS 
One 10, no. 6 (2015): e0127502, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.
pone.0127502.

21 Lorcan Dempsey, “Library Collections in the Life of the User: 
Two Directions,” LIBER Quarterly 26, no. 4 (2016): 338–59, 
DOI: http://doi.org/10.18352/lq.10170.

22 Jean-Claude Guédon, Open Access: Toward the Internet of the Mind, 
BOAI15 Statement, February 23, 2017, http://www.budapestope-
naccessinitiative.org/open-access-toward-the-internet-of-the-
mind.

23 John Wenzler, “Scholarly Communication and the Dilemma 
of Collective Action: Why Academic Journals Cost Too Much,” 
College & Research Libraries 78, no. 2 (February 2017): 192. DOI: 
https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.78.2.16581.

24 Alejandro Posada and George Chen, “Preliminary Findings: Rent 
Seeking by Elsevier: Publishers are increasingly in control of 
scholarly infrastructure and why we should care,” The Knowl-
edge Gap Geopolitics of Academic Production, September 20th 
2017, http://knowledgegap.org/index.php/sub-projects/rent-
seeking-and-financialization-of-the-academic-publishing-
industry/preliminary-findings/.

http://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.3081787.v1
http://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.3081787.v1
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/elseviers-profits-swell-more-ps900-million
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/elseviers-profits-swell-more-ps900-million
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/elseviers-profits-swell-more-ps900-million
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0127502
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0127502
http://doi.org/10.18352/lq.10170
http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/open-access-toward-the-internet-of-the-mind
http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/open-access-toward-the-internet-of-the-mind
http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/open-access-toward-the-internet-of-the-mind
https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.78.2.16581
http://knowledgegap.org/index.php/sub-projects/rent-seeking-and-financialization-of-the-academic-publishing-industry/preliminary-findings/
http://knowledgegap.org/index.php/sub-projects/rent-seeking-and-financialization-of-the-academic-publishing-industry/preliminary-findings/
http://knowledgegap.org/index.php/sub-projects/rent-seeking-and-financialization-of-the-academic-publishing-industry/preliminary-findings/


Plenary Sessions  35

25 David W. Lewis, “The 2.5% Commitment,” https://scholarworks.
iupui.edu/handle/1805/14063 and David W, Lewis, Lori Goetsch, 
Diane Graves, and Mike Roy, “Funding Community Controlled 
Open Infrastructure for Scholarly Communication: The 2.5% 
Commitment Initiative,” College & Research Libraries News, 79, no. 
3 March 2018):133-136, https://crln.acrl.org/index.php/crlnews/
article/view/16902.

26 David Bond, “Relx Buys Bepress to Boost Academic Publish-
ing,” Financial Times, August 2, 2017, https://www.ft.com/content/
c6f6c594-7787-11e7-a3e8-60495fe6ca71.

27 U.S. Department of Education, Academic Libraries: 2012. First Look 
(Washington, DC: National Center for Educational Statistics, 
January 2014): 10, https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2014/2014038.pdf.

28 American Theological Library Association, ATLA Strategic Plan, 
February 2015, https://www.atla.com/about/who/Pages/ATLA-
Strategic-Plan.aspx.

29 ATLA, 2017 Annual Report, p. 50, https://www.atla.com/about/
pressroom/annualreport/Documents/ATLA%20Annual%20
Report%20FY17.pdf.

https://scholarworks.iupui.edu/handle/1805/14063
https://scholarworks.iupui.edu/handle/1805/14063
https://crln.acrl.org/index.php/crlnews/article/view/16902
https://crln.acrl.org/index.php/crlnews/article/view/16902
https://www.ft.com/content/c6f6c594-7787-11e7-a3e8-60495fe6ca71
https://www.ft.com/content/c6f6c594-7787-11e7-a3e8-60495fe6ca71
https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2014/2014038.pdf
https://www.atla.com/about/who/Pages/ATLA-Strategic-Plan.aspx
https://www.atla.com/about/who/Pages/ATLA-Strategic-Plan.aspx
https://www.atla.com/about/pressroom/annualreport/Documents/ATLA%20Annual%20Report%20FY17.pdf
https://www.atla.com/about/pressroom/annualreport/Documents/ATLA%20Annual%20Report%20FY17.pdf
https://www.atla.com/about/pressroom/annualreport/Documents/ATLA%20Annual%20Report%20FY17.pdf

