Open access in the real world.

This article reports that open access to scholarly information is a hot-button issue that quickly triggers heated discussion, especially if the topic arises in a mixed group of librarians and publishers. Issues surrounding open access are important, and they deserve serious considerations. Serious considerations however, requires the recognition of certain legal and economic realities. In addressing them in this article, it will seem to some readers that the author is belaboring the obvious, but he thinks a careful treatment of these points is necessary, because while many in the library profession recognize them as self-evidently true, there are some who regard them as blasphemous. First, there is no such thing as free information. There is a second basic reality of the information economy that bears on the open-access question, and this one is more controversial than the first: Information is not a public good.