Digital publishing and the knowledge process

The impact of Open Access initiatives could have a profound impact on scholarly knowledge distribution. The process will be both liberating and disruptive, but in the short term will undoubtedly be a hybrid situation for access to and distribution of knowledge. Liberating in that it could release a large amount of scholarly material in a variety of forms globally without the financial barriers imposed by multinational publishers. Disruptive in the sense that major changes will be required in scholarly practice to change the paradigms of scholarly communication.