Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
OA becomes so predominant that virtually all costs are shifted
away from end-users and on to some blend of taxpayers, third-
party donors and sponsoring institutions. (Depending on how the
blend plays out, this could turn out to be essentially the same as
scenario 2, with the additional participation of private foundations
and sponsors.)
4
None of these solutions is obvious on the near-term horizon, and none
of them would be straightforward or easy. All would entail
unanticipated consequences, just as the current system does. It is
probably too late for publishers to change their pricing practices
dramatically; shareholders are not notable for their understanding of
the complex realities of the scholarly information marketplace.
Nationalization is always fraught with complication and unforeseen
consequences, and (it must be said) frequently with bureaucratic
incompetence. Purchasing individual articles is a fundamentally
rational way of distributing access to journal content, but in itself it
does not actually address the pricing problem - at $30 or $40 per
download, such purchasing of many journals' content would be even
less affordable than a subscription. A large-scale OA solution remains
elusive, in part because of a recalcitrant academic culture that has not
yet learned how to deal with non-traditional publishing options, and in
part because OA amounts to a cost-shifting project and there is as yet
no consensus on where exactly the costs should end up.
What is clear is that the crisis point is suddenly much closer, much
sooner than anyone expected. Libraries that have sustained double-digit
cuts to their materials budgets (and as of this writing in early 2009, that
cohort is very large) are making extremely difficult decisions about how
to cut their subscription profiles for 2010-11 and are planning to have
to make similarly difficult decisions for the following year. It seems very
likely that, ten years from now, we will be looking back at 2010-11 as
the year that the serials pricing crisis finally came to a head.
Conclusion - scholarly information on the near horizon
Prognostication is, famously, a sucker's game. However, there are some
current trends that, it seems wise to assume, will form a permanent part
of the future scholarly information landscape, and there are some
