Scholarly Communication and Publishing Issues

Is there a ‘crisis’ in scholarly communications as widely reported in the last few years? Decide for yourself. There are certainly some trends that dramatically affect research, university budgets, and the scholarly mission. That is, these trends affect you, whatever your discipline or position in academia.

Stanford’s Science and Engineering Libraries have cut many subscriptions because prices are increasing so rapidly. Devaluation of the dollar and older content being resold in a digital format has further eroded our buying power.

Publishing scholarly communications is an international, multi-billion dollar business. Mergers in the publishing industry have reduced competition. While e-journals have the potential to be less expensive than print copies, some publishers have adopted pricing models that protect revenue streams, regardless of what format is purchased. There are also a number of issues affecting long-term access to digital resources that need to be addressed. For example, should Stanford locally archive e-journals or rely on publishers to provide long-term access?

We invite members of the Stanford community to consider supporting publications produced by non-profit professional societies and institutional repositories which are viable alternatives to the for-profit journals. We also suggest that Stanford authors negotiate with journal publishers to retain certain copyrights.

This website was created to help users learn more about these critical issues and to develop strategies for addressing them.