In this article Katie Wilson, Cameron Neylon, Chloe Brookes-Kenworthy, Richard Hosking, Chun-Kai (Karl) Huang, Lucy Montgomery, and Alkim Ozaygen assess the “openness” of a selection of 20 universities from 15 countries by focusing on the flexibility and availability of their libraries for unaffiliated users. The authors acknowledge that open access is growing worldwide, and is evident through an increase in publishing as well as institutional policies suggesting or even mandating open access to research. However, many of these same institutions have very restrictive approaches to the physical spaces of their libraries. As Wilson et al. write,

Openness is not embedded throughout all academic library workflows and practices. (n.p)

In many cases there are valid practical and legal reasons for such a position, as the authors acknowledge. But Wilson et al. also infer that true access to research would also be reflected in a more public, and more open, stance in regard to non-academic utilization of academic libraries.

 

Work cited

Wilson, Katie, Cameron Neylon, Chloe Brookes-Kenworthy, Richard Hosking, Chun-Kai (Karl) Huang, Lucy Montgomery, and Alkim Ozaygen. 2019. “‘Is the Library Open?’: Correlating Unaffiliated Access to Academic Libraries with Open Access Support.” Liber Quartlerly 29: 33pp. https://www.liberquarterly.eu/article/10.18352/lq.10298/