The Issue:
Several recent studies (before June 2001) have concluded that the current system of scholarly communication is in danger. Research libraries, along with their educational institutions, are caught in a spiral of increasing output of research publication and steeply increasing prices for those publications, that has dramatically decreased their capacity to build comprehensive collections. Intellectual property has become a commercial commodity for which institutions pay twice: first to support faculty and students conducting research, then again to buy the results of that research at high prices from commercial entities.

Nationally, the price of the average journal subscription increased 207% between 1986 and 1999. The price of the average book increased 65%. During the same period, the Consumer Price Index increased by only 56%. The result is decreasing access to essential research resources.

For More Information:

1) Web resources:
• UVa Library Scholarly Communication Website: http://www.lib.virginia.edu/scholcomm.html; including " Price of Scholarly Communication," about the crisis in the cost of academic journal publications: an online slide-show presentation by Diane Walker, December 2000.
• Create Change website: http://www.createchange.org/
• Declaring Independence website: http://www.arl.org/sparc/DI
• Eprints and Openarchives websites: http://www.eprints.org/ and http://www.openarchives.org/
• UVa's library Anthropology journals: the 144 subscribed Anthropology journals and the 73 Anthropology Electronic journals http://www.lib.virginia.edu/journals.html
• Journal cost effectiveness studies:
  • Cornell ( http://www.arl.org/newsltr/205/cornell.html)
  • University of Wisconsin ( http://www.arl.org/newsltr/205/wisconsin.html)
  • Cost per use report for UW journals - Anthroplogy and Linguistics

  2) Articles

• " Are we headed for a Bookless Campus?", Chronicle of Higher Education, 18 May 2001; including " A University That Reveres Tradition Experiments With E-Books" (About the E-Text Center at the University of Virginia)
• Stevan Harnad's "Free at Last: The Future of Peer-Reviewed Journals" (December 1999)
  and " For Whom the Gate Tolls? Freeing the Scholarly and Scientific Research Literature Online Through Author/Institution Self-Archiving" (January 2001) http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm

Back to the top

Webber Philip McEldowney
Last Update - Monday, 02 June 2008