The Issues

Scholarly communication is changing rapidly in ways that strike at the heart of the academy across all disciplines. These trends affect how faculty, researchers, librarians, and students undertake work and have an impact on authorship, editorial boards, promotion and tenure decisions, and budgets. The ACRL (Association of College and Research Libraries) Scholarly Communication Toolkit highlights a number of key issues that affect how scholarly information is produced, disseminated, preserved, and used.

Economics Issues

The economic structure of scholarly communication has undergone a number of substantial changes in recent years which have had a significant negative impact across all academic disciplines. Factors influencing these changes include:

Rising Costs and Decreasing Purchase Power

Worldwide journal prices continue to rise significantly faster than inflation and library budgets. In North America, for example, research libraries spent 227% more on journals in 2002 than in 1986. The Consumer Price Index rose 57% during this same period.
Journal inflation continues to increase at a rate of 6-12% annually.
Journal price increases have led to continued journal cancellations with fewer journals being purchased by libraries.
While a growing number of journals are now available online, this access often comes at an extra cost.
Despite cuts in subscriptions, a few publishers continue to post large profits - up to 40% in some cases.

Impact on Monographs

In North America, research libraries purchased 5% fewer books in 2002 than in 1986, despite spending 62% more. Non-research libraries are experiencing similar problems.
As libraries are forced to spend more of their materials budgets on expensive journals, the market for books is reduced. Today many scholarly books sell only 200-400 copies compared with 1500 copies a decade ago.
University presses reject some quality manuscripts with limited market potential because publishing costs cannot be recovered.
As a result, younger faculty may not be able to find a publisher for their books.

Copyright Issues

As the author of an article published in a scholarly journal, you may be asked to sign away your copyrights, in full or in part, to the publisher as a condition of publication.

When you surrender your copyright, you also surrender control of your work.
Scholars who sign away all rights can find themselves requesting permission from publishers to place their own articles on a personal web site, in a course pack or an institutional repository, or to distribute copies to colleagues.
Scholars create the content (articles) and provide editing and peer review. In general, publishers receive both content and quality control at no cost.
Libraries face tremendous pressure to continue providing access to “core journals” in every discipline represented on a campus – regardless of price.

Tenure & Promotion Issues

Rewards in academe are often based on recognition for scholarly publication. Younger faculty members working toward tenure and promotion have a special challenge here, since they need to publish in recognized journals.

Prestigious journals are often owned by large high-profit corporations, which tend to charge higher prices than do scholarly societies.
Publishing in journals owned by high-profit corporations helps perpetuate a system of high prices, restrictive access and undesirable licensing terms.
At the same time, scholars may be hesitant to submit their work to open access publishers due to concerns that open access journals will be valued less by tenure/promotion committees than publication in traditional print journals.

Learn More:

Economic Issues

ACRL Principles and Strategies for the Reform of Scholarly Communication

Allen Press Annual Study of Journal Prices for Scientific and Medical Society Journals

An Economic Analysis of Scientific Research Publishing - By the Welcome Trust

Eigenfactor - Scholarly references join journals together in a vast network of citations. Eigenfactor uses the structure of the entire network (instead of purely local citation information) to evaluate the importance of each journal.

Journal Cost-Effectiveness Tool - The simple cost of a journal does not necessarily reflect its value. A journal can be very expensive and very valuable or it may simply have a very expensive price tag. A new tool under development for calculating the cost-effectiveness of particular journal titles can help with this kind of evaluation.

Journals in the Time of Google - By Lee C. Van Orsdel & Kathleen Born, Library Journal, 4/15/2006

Library Journal's Periodicals Price Survey 2004

Monograph and Serial Costs in ARL Libraries, 1986-2004

Serial Price Increase Report - Compiled by Swets Information Services

Ted Bergstrom's Journal Pricing Page

Copyright Issues

Copyright Issues and Scholarly Communications - By Laura N. Gasaway, A White Paper for the UNC-Chapel Hill Scholarly Communications Convocation, January 2005

Promotion Issues

Scholarly Communication and Electronic Publication: Implications for Research, Advancement, and Promotion By Lizbeth Langston, University of California, Riverside, 1996

Electronic Publishing: Communication in a Scholarly Environment - Article by Terry Noreault & Bradley C. Watson OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc.