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make further use of them. In the second place, digital humanities research should broaden its
views and methods. By collaborating with experts in history, philosophy, linguistics, literature,
art, archaeology and music, and etc., it should put historical materials in a more general social
environment to examine and study. Lastly, digital humanities research should put efforts on
relevancy between materials and details of materials as well as the backgrounds (Zhong, 2015).
IFLA initiated IFLA Trend Report in 2013, and set up Digital Humanities-Digital Scholarship
Special Interest Groups, which indicates IFLA’s concern over digital humanities research. In 2017
IFLA launched Digital Unification and set up working group including members from UNESCO’s
Memory of the World Program, International Council on Archives (ICA), Conference of Directors
of National Libraries (CDNL) and so on. Its objective is to jointly develop and share original
materials and artifacts scattered all over the world through Internet and enable researchers and
the public a more integral view of interconnecting culture and history. The development of digital
humanities provides a new perspective for integrating Library Science with history of civilization,
history of science and technology as well as social history. In the future digital humanities will
apply open science to engage the public in exploration and service of historical resources. As ICT
and digital humanities advance, research and exploration of historical materials will usher in a
brand-new era (IFLA, 2017d).

6 Open access

It has been over 20 years since Steven Harnad proposed open access. It has been even more than a
decade since the publication of Budapest Manifesto and Berlin Manifesto (Baldock, 2017). Open
access characterized with knowledge sharing develops both in scope and in depth and becomes
more and more popular. Its significance not only lies in the openness and sharing of knowledge,
but also most importantly in that it will change scientific paradigm and knowledge communication,
improve scientific creative capacities and promote development of economic society. By 2013
40% of peer reviews papers in the European Union had been open access, which reached tipping
point (“Open access to research publications reaching ‘tipping point’ ”, 2013). Open access has
become universally acknowledged: scientific results sponsored by public funds must be open
access except those involving countries’ or military confidential matters. Commercial data should
also be open access as long as it has potential public effects such as clinical data. In early times
libraries supported open access mainly to cope with the rising in price of journals. Now conditions
have changed. Even publishing houses are changing their commercial business models to support
open access. For example, in 2015 Springer and Jisc reached agreement on a model to reduce the
total cost of ownership of open access and journal subscriptions (2015).
The second step of further development of open access is to re-evaluate data and the significance
of open access. Some scholars hold that today the focus on the openness and circulation of
research results is shifting to reuse of research data. Consequently, the basic unit of production