Current Issues With Scholarly Publishing

Costs

The costs of print and electronic journals have accelerated well above the rate of inflation for over fifteen years, and a significant number of libraries can no longer afford the same journals to which they subscribed in the past. Even as subscription costs rise, the number of journals published is growing in response to increased research activity in growing and emerging fields. Licensing electronic journals generally costs more than subscriptions to print materials, and library budgets can no longer absorb all these increases. Even the largest, most comprehensive research libraries have begun to cut subscriptions to journals they no longer can afford.

The problem of cost is exacerbated because researchers are not always aware of this impact to library budgets, or the fact that subscription rates are far higher for the institution than the individual. Although scholars may have individual subscriptions to some core journals, a library's subscriptions to journals is the primary dissemination point for most scholarly publication. When a journal subscription is cut, all researchers in the institution the library serves are cut off from easy access to that journal's content.

Copyright

Often researchers must sign away all copyright privileges to the publishing company in return for publishing their articles. This means that researchers no longer own or control the intellectual property that they created. In many cases researchers end up indirectly paying for their own creativity if they desire to use their own publications in further research.

Mergers

The number of mergers that are occurring in the publishing field also mean that the control of the publishing resides in the hands of just a few publishers. Since 1999, the number of major science, technology, and medical publishers has dropped from thirteen to six-all through mergers. With less competition, publishers are able to charge increasingly higher prices for their journals.