Suicide Squeeze: The Escalating Cost of Scholarly Journals

Abstract

demic libraries and the people who rely on them for information. Retrieving a desperately needed journal article from a library's collection has recently become more difficult, especially if it appears in a relatively new scientific title. Feeble budget increases within academe and the astronomical prices of scientific journals have curtailed the purchasing of new titles and forced the cancellation of many existing ones. Journals have become so important to faculty research that, in order to retain as many as possible, librarians have had to sacrifice monographs to preserve serials. Many libraries devote as much as 80 percent of their materials budgets to serials purchases just to maintain the status quo, and these purchases are estimated to funnel almost one half of a billion dollars annually from the coffers of U.S. libraries into the hands of journal publishers. As a consequence, at many university libraries, less money is available for materials in the social sciences and humanities, which traditionally consist more of monographs and books, as funds are diverted to feed the scientific journals. At Clemson University, serials purchases comprised 84 percent of the 1987 materials budget. Annual increases of 15 to 20 percent in serials expenditures have been common in recent years, fueled in part by the rapid drop in the value of the dollar against key foreign currencies. In the academic year 1987-88, for example, Stanford University libraries experienced a $300,000 shortfall in their acquisitions budget. A one-time bail-out from the university helped them meet their commitments, but since this money was not added to the base the Stanford libraries were forced to cut four