Dee Ann Divis, Journals torque library budgets, United Press International, August 11, 2004. Excerpt: "Prices for scientific journals have continued to climb, with package deals by the biggest firms forcing smaller publications off the shelves. Libraries, facing budget cuts and angry over ever increasing prices, are organizing buying consortia, sharing pricing information and even using cancellations to strike back directly at publishers they consider abusive....From the libraries' perspective, it does not matter if the cost is justified or not. The accumulation of prices increases and continuing budget cuts has made the current pricing models unsustainable. They are revolting against prices in general and against new bundled contracts in particular....Publishers are seeing the handwriting, too, and are considering new business models, 'We are doing our own experiments,' said Eric Merkel-Sobotta, director of corporate relations at Elsevier, the largest of the commercial publishers. 'We recognize that the system is in transition,' he told UPI."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/12/2004 02:56:00 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.
