Mary Case, Information Access Alliance: Challenging anticompetitive behavior in academic publishing, College & Research Libraries News, June 2004. Excerpt: "While mergers and acquisitions in publishing reflect a general global trend, librarians have been concerned with the growing concentration within scholarly publishing, especially as it has affected scientific, technical, and medical (STM) journals and legal serials publications. Enhanced revenue, improved efficiencies, and reduced costs are often mentioned by companies as the justification for mergers. Within scholarly publishing, however, librarians have watched the number of companies shrink while prices rise and service declines....All members of IAA are devoted to finding alternative models of scholarly communication. All are promoting efforts to move to an open access environment. But we all also know that it may be several years before the current systems are transformed. In the meantime, Taylor and Francis continues its aggressive acquisitions campaign, and Candover and Cinven have indicated their desire to purchase a third scholarly publisher. If our efforts can stop or even slow the pace of mergers of STM and legal publishers, we can perhaps constrain price increases in some small measure and allow libraries to allocate resources to support new models of scholarly publishing."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/26/2004 02:15:00 PM.
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.
