The Current Crisis
A CRISIS IN SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION IS SHAKING the foundations of how scholars—and their institutions—communicate. The crisis began with an unprecedented rise in the cost of scholarly journals. From 1986 to 2002, journal prices rose 227 percent although the Consumer Price Index rose 64 percent.1 Plus, publishing vendors often obligate institutions to buy bundled packages of journals, whether an institution wants the entire bundle or not.As a result, the vast majority of library collection budgets go to journals—more than 90 percent in some cases—even as libraries experience shrinking budgets. When libraries cannot afford journals, scholars cannot get or share the information they need.
As institutions lost control of their budgets to big publishing vendors, authors were losing control of their copyrights. Scholars were finding that stipulations in publishing contracts did not allow them to use their own work for education and scholarship. In the worst cases, scholars cannot use their own papers in class, post them on their institution’s website, or share them with colleagues.
Frustrated scholars and institutions began developing new models of scholarly communications. This crisis in scholarly communications and the migration to new models is bringing changes to Santa Clara University.
Important to all scholars are the organizations that formed in response to the crisis in scholarly communications: SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), an alliance of universities, research libraries, and organizations, and Create Change, a SPARC initiative to educate scholars and develop new models. Every scholar should know about these two organizations and the three critical areas of scholarly communications: Author Rights, Institutional Repositories, Open-Access Journals.