The term serials crisis has become common shorthand for the runaway cost increases of many scholarly journals. The crisis is a result of the cost rising much faster than the rate of inflation, the number of such journals proliferating, and the funds available to the libraries is decreasing.

Many of the publishers of scientific journals are in Europe. As the United States dollar has weakened in relation to the currencies of Europe, the prices of journals have increased faster than the inflation rate.

Due to the publish or perish philosophy, the explosion in the number of academic subfields, and the increasing domination of scholarly communication by commercial publishers, the number of journals has increased.

At the same time, libraries have seen cutbacks in funds due to funding cuts to libraries as well as other expenditures such as computers and networking equipment.

To contain costs, libraries are increasingly borrowing journals from one another and purchasing single articles from commercial document suppliers in order to maintain access to the latest scholarly research for their users. Libraries are also canceling subscriptions to the least used journals. Libraries are switching from printed to electronic copies of serials. Collaborative ventures have been used to bringing together many titles and publishers to create low-cost online journals with reasonable subscription terms and, in some cases, free access to titles.

See also

External links

• Open Access Overview Peter Suber
• The Post-Gutenberg Galaxy: How to Get There from Here Stevan Harnad
• Electronic Journals and Scholarly Communication: A Citation and Reference StudyStephen P. Harter and Hak Joon Kim
• Electronic Publishing in Science International Council of Scientific Unions/UNESCO
• New Horizons in Scholarly Communication Librarians Association of the University of California
• Tragic Loss or Good Riddance? The Impending Demise of Traditional Scholarly Journals Andrew M. Odlyzko
• The Library 'Doomsday Machine' Anne Okerson and Kendon Stubbs
• The Crisis in Scholarly Publishing University of Waterloo (Canada) Scholarly Societies Project
• Bridging the Gap Between Traditional and Electronic Scholarly Publishing Jerry Willis
• The Serials Crisis A White Paper for the UNC-Chapel Hill Scholarly Communications Convocation, Judith M. Panitch and Sarah Michalak, January, 2005

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