Back to the Future
December 2009
Once upon a time, in a faraway land, all the days were sunny and bright, a rising tide floated everyone’s boat, all the children were above average, and scholarly authors, publishers, and academic librarians lived together in harmony. It was an idyllic time in which authors wrote, publishers published, librarians purchased any and all of the materials their patrons needed, and access to information was never a problem.
Over time, however, problems arose in our prosperous and peaceable kingdom. Ironically, it all began with prosperity. For with prosperity came growth, and with growth came change. As the number of scholars grew, so did the number of articles and books they produced, encouraging—even requiring—many publishers to expand their programs, which in turn increased the number of titles libraries needed to buy to keep up with the rapidly growing literature. For a time all was well, for even as their collection development expenses grew, so did library materials budgets.
But then, one day, the economic tide stopped rising, some boats began to settle into the mud, and our harmonious scholarly communication system became less harmonious. As the steadily increasing cost of materials outstripped the growth of their materials budgets, libraries were no longer able to purchase all the materials of potential relevance to their institution’s academic programs. They became more selective, purchasing only those items of greatest importance while devising innovative methods for obtaining access to less critical materials when needed.
Publishers, now selling fewer copies of their titles, responded in a variety of ways. Like librarians, most scholarly book publishers became more selective. Increasingly, they focused their efforts on titles with greater market potential while abandoning more specialized areas. While this was not an option for some, especially most scholarly associations, those journal publishers who had the freedom to do so quickly followed suit. All publishers, large and small, commercial and nonprofit, reacted to steadily declining unit sales and circulation with their single most readily available tool, price increases, while those publishers with the deepest pockets began taking over their smaller colleagues in pursuit of economies of scale.
And so it was that discord entered the land. Increasingly, librarians, publishers, and authors became openly critical of one another. Librarians accused publishers of price gouging, greed, and a general lack of imagination. Publishers bemoaned librarians’ ignorance of publishing realities and lack of appreciation of their contribution to the scholarly communication process. Authors, although not directly in the initial line of fire, were drawn into the fray, some siding with librarians and others with publishers. And all parties seemingly forgot that they had once lived and worked in a more harmonious manner, in which each party focused on its own complementary role in the scholarly communication process.
So there you have it, folks, the current state of scholarly communication circa 2009. The final outcome remains unclear, but there is at least one choice over which we have some control: how to conduct the current debate. We can keep arguing, or we can start talking to one another again. I don’t know about you, dear reader, but talking sure sounds like the better approach to me.—IER
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