Crisis in Scholarly Communication
Overview
Scholarly communication is the system whereby researchers communicate their ideas to peers and others in the scholarly community. It includes the creation, evaluation, distribution, and preservation of the output of researchers and scholars, often in peer-reviewed journals. Libraries play a key role in the process as they provide the access to and preservation of scholarship without which further scholarship would be impeded.
An important part of the process of scholarly communication is the broadest possible sharing of academic publications among scholars and students worldwide.
Crisis
The scholarly communication crisis refers to the current and future erosion of access to the scholarly literature resulting from the inability of institutional library budgets to keep pace with the rising cost of journal subscriptions and scholar's increasing loss of rights to their works as a result of signing away copyright.
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Graph 1. Serials prices skyrocket in research libraries across the US and Canada. The graph shows just how drastically by comparing it to the consumer price index.
Source: ARL Statistics 2003-04, Association of Research Libraries, Washington, D.C. |
Libraries and their institutions worldwide can no longer keep up with the increasing volume and cost of scholarly resources. Journal price increases of more than 215% over the last 15 years have forced libraries not only to cancel journal subscriptions but to purchase fewer books. Less specialized material is being published, and university presses are threatened with closure.
Cornell University has an interesting online exhibit highlighting the rising cost of library journal subscriptions to support faculty and student research.
How has this impacted us at Georgia Tech?
GA Tech has felt the impact of this crisis in scholarly communication. The library has struggled to keep access to resources that faculty need as we are locked in to expensive deals that 'bundle' critical journals with irrelevant ones and not having the often 7-12% yearly 'inflation' increase required to keep a subscription.
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Graph 2. This graph shows the dramatic increases in the cost of serials at GA Tech as well as showing the reduction of monograph (book) purchases due to this.
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