Key Issues in Scholarly Communication
- We cannot continue with the current practices in scholarly communication; commercial publishers’ price increases continue to soar past any budget increases.
- This problem has been growing since the 1970’s, and so far there has been very limited success in solving it. Now, several academic and research libraries are investigating the publishing of scholarly information to compete with, if not evade, the expensive commercial publishers.
- While the greatest pressure is in the area of scientific journals, this is really a broader problem, a crisis, affecting the whole of scholarly communications. The prices of some scholarly societies are also rising fast, but commercial publishers charge much higher prices than the societies.
- Increases in library budgets will not solve this. Budgets cannot grow exponentially as the prices and numbers of scholarly journals can and do. As a result, expenditures rise while the number of journals owned or accessible continues to drop.
- The need for their commodity (scholarly communication) allows the commercial publishers to continue to inflate their prices and their control.
- The core of this problem is cultural, not economic or technical and is generated by the publishing practices of academia.
