Exploring new ways of publishing: a library-faculty partnership.

Abstract

A number of perspectives exist in response to the “crisis in scholarly communication,” particularly in the sciences. This crisis represents the financial pressure of the increasing number of published journals coupled with subscription inflation rates exceeding 10% each year. Until recently, it was largely a “library problem,” but university provosts and other administrators have become sensitized to the issue as librarians request more funds to support the costs. Beyond protesting the journal cuts made by their libraries, faculty have remained for the most part unaware of broader issues, such as the consequence of signing away their intellectual property rights to the journals in which they publish. With the advent of electronic publishing, the issues have become even more complex [1, 2]. Over the past five years, a number of initiatives have emerged to address the process and economics of the current system of scholarly communication and to broaden the discussion from a library problem to one that involves the entire academic community [3]. In 1998, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) began the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), “a world-wide alliance of research institutions, librarians, and organizations that encourages competition in the scholarly communications market” [4]. In 2000, ARL followed SPARC with a process to educate faculty about new publishing paradigms called Create Change, which “seeks to address the crisis in scholarly communication by helping scholars regain control of the scholarly communication system” [5].