The ever thought-provoking David Rosenthal has a short post over at his blog entitled "Access vs. Control," which draws attention to Hugh Rundle's observation that "Librarians created the serials crisis because they focussed on access instead of control."
While I think the relationship between libraries and the serials crisis is a bit more nuanced than that, it is an interesting way of reframing an old debate, which back in the day was typically framed as "Access vs. Ownership". The "Access vs. Ownership" debates go back at least as far as the 90s, when it first became widely possible to separate access to information from its ownership. In the pre-digital era, of course, if you wanted to provide access to, say, a journal article, you (or one of your interlibrary lending partners) had to own a copy of the journal. In the digital era, you don't have to own copies of things; instead you can just pay for the right to access them. This was seen to be OK, because Libraries were seen to be more about access than ownership.
The problem, which Rosenthal and Rundle make clear, is that by losing ownership of information you lose control of it. And that puts you in a relation of dependence with third parties whose best interests don't always coincide with your own. So we wind up paying a lot more for stuff than we would if we'd be savvier, and more able to mobilize in our long-term collective interest. And ultimately, we wind up losing access when we can no longer afford to pay the monopoly rents demanded by our suppliers.
So "Access vs. Ownership" turns out not to have been a very good way of framing the discussion, because it does not make explicit the relationship between Ownership and Control, and also because ultimately Access and Ownership are in a complementary relationship, not an adversarial one.