Lee Van Orsdel and Kathleen Born, Choosing Sides--Periodical Price Survey 2005, Library Journal, April 15, 2005. Excerpt: 'One indicator [of deep change] is the sharpened rhetoric that signifies growing consensus about the nature of the ongoing "serials crisis." Librarians are quick now to challenge anyone who suggests that an infusion of new funds from their institutions will solve the problem. Higher education itself is in a funding crisis and in no position to rescue library materials budgets. Nor will the crisis be solved by lower rates of annual inflation for journal titles. For decades we focused concern on annual price increases while base prices for scientific journals, in particular, cumulated into such a mass that the entire scholarly communications system has become unsustainable. As evidence mounts that the STM journals crisis has weakened other segments of the scholarly publishing market, including book publishers, virtually everyone concedes that change is necessary and that it must come quickly. Our "serials crisis" has, in fact, morphed into what some would call a crisis of public policy, pulling patient advocates, taxpayers, researchers, grant agencies, legislators, and antitrust lawyers into unlikely alliances with academic librarians --all united in pursuit of more open and affordable access to scientific information for the good of society as a whole. These alliances do not exclude scholarly publishers, many of whom welcome the benefits of opened access. Even publishers whose opposition is fixed would have to agree that the open access (OA) movement is pushing the market. But there is little agreement on how or to what extent....Despite rumors to the contrary, the OA movement remains a powerful catalyst for change....An ISI study found that the open access journals it tracks for impact are doing well, even when compared with very well-established traditional journals. As other studies of OA vs. toll-access articles emerge, indications are that OA literature will exceed toll-protected literature in both citations and downloads.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 4/15/2005 12:19:00 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.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
