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The Economics of Scholarly Communication
An economic crisis in scholarly communication has been building during the past 50 years and has dramatically escalated during the past decade. Scholarly communication has changed from a means to share research discoveries with interested colleagues to a world of big business. Scholars historically and currently produce and review the content found in commercially published journals. In addition, scholars are usually required to turn over copyright to the commercial publisher, and, in some cases, are asked to pay a per page fee to be published. Commercial publishers then turn around and sell this same scholarly content back, often at exorbitant and constantly inflating prices, to the libraries at the same institutions supporting the author-scholars. While commercial publishers are making profits of up to 40%, libraries are annually forced to reduce the number of journals and books purchased each year, thereby, decreasing scholars’ access to the content they produced.
Given this, scholars and academic institutions have been called upon to consider methods for changing the existing system. The following sites provide a more in-depth view of the problem and information about some of the ways the system might be modified or changed.
Scholars Under Siege: The Scholarly Communication Process
This Create Change site provides an overview of the crisis in scholarly communication and strategies for changing the situation.
Scholarship & Scholarly Communication in the Electronic Age
An article from Educause, by Stanley Chodorow that includes information on the history of scholarly communications back to the 17th century and ideas on how to create a healthy scholarly communication system today.
The Tempe Principles (Principles for Emerging Systems of Scholarly Publishing)
The Tempe Principles site provides that could guide the transformation of the scholarly publishing system. Additional means of improving the current system and the roles scholars might play in this process are included.
The Pennsylvania State University ©2003
Last updated June 12, 2003
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