Every time, it’s the same game: At the beginning of a new year, we read accounts of new technology trends and expected technological leaps or simply new hypes. These are presented to the astonished world as concepts in studies, white papers, reports, and theses—more or less elaborate, sometimes thicker, sometimes less extensive. We are all just waiting for it, throwing ourselves with new momentum into reading about and implementing the latest fashions. We believe we finally have innovations in our projects. What would libraries be without the army of innovation scouts or without trend monitoring?

Every year, it seems, the relevant consulting companies and the many nonprofit organizations that are cavorting in the broad field of technology and the digital world simply go over their previous reports to update, reformulate, or slightly refresh their (old) trends. Those who announce “breaking news” every 12 months make themselves look suspicious, even in our fast-moving times. Perhaps they are imagining new trends rather than actually “having seen” them in reality as an emerging development.

However, there are still a few honest people on the market for trendy vanities. In Outsell, Inc.’s “Information Industry Outlook 2018,” Leigh Watson Healy observes that there was nothing particularly new in Forrester’s 2017 Predictions. Analysts at Forrester, the leading market research institute for information technology, could only discuss key technologies such as augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR), the Internet of Things, artificial intelligence (AI), and the long-running topic of cloud computing. And these are obviously not so much the revolutions of 2019, but topics that we have been hearing about in the information industry for some time now, with out being able to buy too many practical and useful applications for our libraries, apart from the technology of cloud computing.

Nobody knows whether the trends are really running out of breath or whether only the trend scouts are running out of fantasy. But there is something reassuring about it if you could take a little time to put all the many innovative top ics into practice—at least some of them—in stead of rushing from one trend to the next.

After all, the topic of technology trends can still be approached with a wink of the eye. Far more important and, unfortunately, also more worrying are the developments that can currently be observed with regard to net neutrality. The net is already full of false and fake content, and content can already be moved to the top with the relevant search engines using SEO tactics and paying for placement. If, however, the infrastructure for the distribution of network content can also be bought in the near future, then the question of the truth in the network will have to be an even more fundamental one.

It is now a question of creating instances and institutions and protecting existing ones that stand for fair and neutral content in a trust worthy manner. Because the less we can trust and rely on the objectivity, accessibility, and neutrality of the internet and its free sources, the more important the institutionalized bodies become that guarantee and reliably secure exactly this objectivity, accessibility, and neutrality. These instances and institutions include libraries and information facilities as well as distributors of information, publishers, and dealers who have been partners and part of a necessary dissemination of information, knowledge, art, and culture for centuries.

And this calls for reliable partners in meaningful, balanced, differentiated, and fair economic relations, not for a monopolistic information industry with the mentality of predatory capitalism for pure profit maximization. But we also do not want a mandatory, state-controlled mega-open access (OA) server, as it is installed right now by the all-powerful EU headquarters in Brussels.

However, more and more players in publication policy are slowly realizing that the current, often one-sided and ideologically overstretched arguments and actions are damaging, rather than benefiting, science and its freedom. But it is to be feared that librarians who are too hasty could also do a disservice to libraries and their future.

Because the catchword “open” has been on everyone’s lips for quite some time, it may be the buzzword par excellence to describe the perceived self-image of the entire society of the 21st century.

Anyone who does not describe himself and his institution with one or, best of all, all buzzwords makes himself suspicious: suspicious of conservatism, of the eternal yesterday, or even of hostility to innovation.

This is obviously how libraries want and should be perceived today. The motto is good, and the intention is not wrong, be cause most libraries have always been open and networked. Just think of the good old interlibrary loan system (which is by no means cynically meant) that libraries have been “networking” professionally for almost 100 years. And what about “openness”? Who, if not libraries, provided access to literature and information with their information platforms centuries before the development of the internet giants? Libraries and their materials were not and are today by no means “closed”—long before the “open access movement” suggested that only a complete change in the publication process could make access to information possible. Not only have libraries always been open, they have opened the door to what an individual neither can afford nor must afford, and thus they have been mediators and guarantors of open, but at the same time organized, structured, and institutionalized, access to literature and information in the best sense of the word.

But the openness of the OA world is quite different—unstructured, random, and instance-less. This opens the door to disinformation and fake news. A study by Sam Wineburg of Stanford University showed that Digital Natives in particular can no longer readily distinguish between an independent scholarly text and sponsored material (stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:fv751yt5934/SHEG%20Evaluating%20Information%20Online.pdf). All of this suggests that there is an urgent need for publishers and libraries to ensure that the world can still differentiate between the arbitrariness of open content on the net and secure knowledge on the basis of which science and (political) opinion-forming can take place. Just like quality journalism—which today finds itself in one of the biggest crises since the existence of the mass media because of the “free-of-charge mentality” and the rejection of a pay barrier—the production of serious scientific content will start to wobble due to misunderstood OA demands. And so will the libraries.

When net neutrality comes to an end, not only must libraries and science stand together for the freedom of science and research and the independence of their content from profit monopolies and state monopolies, but also against the power of research policy and its sponsors.