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unsustainability of current journal pricing. Large shareholder-owned
science publishers, which have heretofore depended on both market
cannibalism and exorbitant inflation rates to maintain annual revenue
growth, will hit the wall in terms of subscription pricing and will
branch out into new kinds of information products (possibly leaving
formal journal publishing to non-profit entities). There are hints of such
efforts already under way.
Mission change in academic and research libraries
Public libraries will continue to serve the general functions that are
their current stock-in-trade: supporting the school work of students
aged 5-18, and providing pleasure reading for the general public.
Research libraries, however, will change dramatically over the next
decade. Much of their role as repositories of standard research
collections will have been obviated by a combination of GBS and the
decline of librarian-crafted collections. The demise of the research
collection will be hastened by the financial crisis that began in 2007 and
will persist in some degree for years to come. The coming decade will
be a difficult one for academic libraries. During this period, institutions
of higher learning will be forced to confront and deal with the radical
wastefulness inherent in traditional models of collection development
and will turn to more efficient, patron-centred and patron-driven
acquisition models. A few major research libraries will continue to serve
as monumental collections that represent the totality of Western
intellectual culture, while the vast majority will tighten their focus on
serving the real-time needs of their specific patron populations and on
capturing and giving the world access to locally produced scholarship,
locally produced data sets and the rare and unique materials that would
otherwise not be captured by the system of commercial scholarship.
Book publishing
By the end of the coming decade, the concept of 'out of print' will have
become a quaint memory. No document that has its origins as a digital
file need ever become unavailable to those who wish to purchase it. In
a related development, most books will be printed and bound only on
demand. The technology for implementing such a programme already
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