When the IFLA Reference and Information Services section decided to use a debate format for its session at the association’s 2019 World Library & Information Congress, one of the debate topics was, “Reference and information services will be less important when all content is open access.”

Almost everyone responding to our call for debaters chose the Against option. They wanted to argue that OA will cause reference and information services to become vastly more important. It’s hard to find people in the library community who don’t like open everything. OA, open source, open repositories, open educational resources, you name it, and if there’s an open option, librarians are in favor.

But should we be? One dissenting voice is Bob Holley, a self-styled “open access heretic.” His op-ed piece in the February 2019 issue of Against the Grain argued that OA harms libraries by encouraging faculty and students to find relevant research outside the library. When bypassing the library becomes the mantra of librarians, is it any wonder that funders cut budgets and libraries are viewed as obsolete? Why pay for databases when OA articles suffice?

There’s a difference between supporting OA and demanding that everything be free. OA relates to scholarly publishing and is most applicable to scientific, grant-supported research. In the social sciences and humanities, there’s philosophical support for OA, but the reality is that little research is grant-supported and much is published in books rather than journal articles. Market research reports, I suspect, will always be costly. Free publications that are advertiser-supported run the risk of being biased in favor of the advertisers. No one seriously expects newspapers to be free, although we enjoy a smattering of free newspaper articles on their websites, nor do people object to paying for magazines such as People or Sports Illustrated. Of course, they can read these for free at their public library but they know—at least I assume they know—that the library pays the subscription.

A basic misconception about OA is that unless articles are free on the publication’s website, they can’t be obtained without paying a steep price. Even librarians fall into this trap. I frequently receive emails from students, faculty, and librarians complaining that an Online Searcher article isn’t free at infotoday.com/onlinesearcher. I routinely check their university’s website to see if they subscribe to any of the databases where Online Searcher articles can, indeed, be found, and then direct them there. The exception is from students at universities, often in the global South, without budgets to afford any of the databases.

Librarians are, justifiably, worried that students turn to Google before attempting searches in subscription databases. Relying solely on information gleaned from the web raises issues around quality, completeness, accuracy, and reliability. OA suffers from its own problems with predatory journals.

Labeling something as “open” does not automatically bestow goodness upon it. The value of openness lies in what actions it encourages and what impact it has, not simply that it’s open. Open is as open does.