Challenges and Responses

Starting in the 1960s, there was a significant increase in scholarly publication, and commercial publishers began to see the profit potential in this medium. There was a series of mergers, acquisitions and takeovers, and by 2003, 68 percent of the scientific, technical and medical publishing market was controlled by seven commercial publishers. Rapidly increasing subscription prices forced libraries to reallocate dollars in an attempt to save as much of the collection as possible.

Beginning in the 1980s, annual subscription costs outpaced the Consumer Price Index. For example, since 1988, scholarly journals have increased at three times the rate of general inflation (64% for the CPI versus 227% for journals). The journals pricing crisis started with science, technical, and medical journals, but is now spreading to social sciences and humanities journals. Libraries have tried to retain as many significant titles as possible, but have found it impossible to keep up with the price increases.

In the long run, electronic versions of journals reduce costs. First, prices have only gone down a very modest 10% to 15%, not much when annual inflation is 9% to 15%, but libraries are currently facing several problems. Secondly, scholars and librarians alike are concerned about long-term access to electronic-versions of journals, especially when subscriptions are cancelled, journals are discontinued, or the company goes out of business.

Yes, alternatives include "open access" journals, institutional repositories, self-archiving, increased scholarly publishing in the non-profit sector, and experimental efforts by established publishers such as Oxford University Press, http://www.biomedcentral.com/openaccess . These models, while still evolving, are designed to yield new benefits by increasing the dissemination of scholarship in timely fashion, controlling costs for libraries, and giving scholars more control of their publications. New organizations are becoming involved in addressing market dysfunction in scholarly communication, for example, SPARC, http://web3.arl.org/sparc , an alliance of universities, research institutions, and organizations focused on enhancing broad and cost-effective access to peer-reviewed scholarship. Through advocacy and education, SPARC's goal is to stimulate expansion of the non-profit sectors share of the overall scholarly publishing activity.

In open access, scholars surrender their copyright on the material, though technically they could prevent unwarranted downloading and copying by employing digital rights management software. There are many experiments with open access models. The Directory of Open Access Journals, http://www.doaj.org , designed to promote increased usage and impact, currently provides access to over 1300 peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly journals. The directory's originators take the position that users have the right " to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles" as mandatory for a journal to be included in the directory.

Open access is not free; someone pays for the costs involved. Scholarly journals that opt for open access use alternative business models. Authors pay a lump sum, approximately $500 to $1500, to the publisher when their article is accepted for publication. These costs can be paid by the author's institution or through a grant. Regardless of the business model used, readers or institutions are not charged for access.

Digital repositories residing in institutions can be viewed as a parallel development to the open access movement. Scholars can place online pre-prints, post-prints, non-copyrighted material, articles where the author hold the copyright, articles where the author has permission from the publisher to post the article, and other material as decided by the institution's repository oversight committee. The material posted online could involve any digitized format, including books, images, audio, and DVD files. Institutional repositories can reside within an institution, a consortium, or other partnership arrangements. For example, the University of Michigan's Digital Library Production Services project, OAIster, http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister, is a service that provides access to over 3.7 million records from more than 360 institutions. OAIster's search engine provides a means for finding and retrieving documents. Academically-oriented digital resources, which once were difficult to access, are now searchable by anyone.

Optionally, individual scholars or their institutions set up web servers where the same types of research found in institutional repositories can be placed. The digital archiving is accomplished by freely available self-archiving software packages that comply with the protocols established in the Open Archive Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. The software is available from sources such as Dspace, http://sourceforge.net/projects/dspace/, the new open source digital repository system from the MIT Libraries and Hewlett-Packard Labs designed to support the digital collections of academic research institutions.

As part of the response to the crisis in scholarly communication, change must occur on a number of levels, including tenure and promotion decisions. Faculty should come to fully recognize electronic publication as a legitimate means of communicating research, and realize that many open access journals use the same double-blind, peer-review models as scholarly print journals for acceptance of articles.

Scholars are encouraged to advocate for open access journals by participating on editorial boards, submitting research to only open access journals, and building awareness among their peers. Also, scholars should try to retain as many rights to their scholarship as possible when negotiating with a publisher. As a journal editor, academics can consider moving their journal to a non-profit publisher.