Margaret Landesman, Price Increases Are Not the Problem, Charleston Advisor, January 2004. Excerpt: "It is troubling that so much of the discussion about scholarly communication focuses on journal price increases....But we know that the issue is not merely what we used to call 'inflation' and now more accurately label 'price increases.' It’s not just about the price increases ––it’s about the price. On the other hand, advocates of Open Access publishing and archiving in their many combinations and permutations sometimes seem to be saying that libraries will never need to pay anybody for anything anymore. Which seems unlikely. There needs to be a place in the middle where common sense might reign. Not everything we need can be free ––but some of it can....To move in the general direction of such a state, libraries must help new publishing initiatives to establish themselves. But our current procedures often result in decisions that push us in the opposite direction, towards funding expansion of the title lists of expensive publishers while denying smaller lower-priced initiatives the ability to grow....To succeed in reducing this reliance [on expensive journals], librarians have to stop looking at themselves as collectors selecting and purchasing a group of items from a larger universe, and start seeing themselves as the people in charge of investing our institutions' limited resources wisely so that future collections will meet future needs."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/29/2004 09:34:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
