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Notice: Due to ongoing construction, 4 East is currently closed to the public.  To obtain items located on 4 East, please place an online request for the item to be paged for you using the ‘Place Request’ button in the catalog. Please visit our Circulation FAQ page for assistance in using our catalog.
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The Need to Transform Scholarly Communication

The past twenty years have seen many changes in scholarly communication. Unsustainable rising costs of traditional and electronic publishing of books and journals are cause for concern by publishers, librarians, educators, and scholars and have decreased access to materials over time. Many have come to believe that innovation, equity in education, and the needs of society require breaking down barriers to the use of scholarly material.

In June, 2019, the BTAA Provosts published a document in support of a sustainable and open ecosystem of publishing.

In March, 2022, the MSU University Council passed a resolution: Encouragement of openly accessible scholarship.

The scholarly publishing system (unlike commercial publishing) is based, in part, on an economy with very small monetary rewards for authors. Authors and reviewers of journal articles provide their work free of charge to publishers and often sign away their copyrights. Scholarly monographs provide only small royalties to authors. The rewards of scholarly publishing come from universities, instead, in tenure and promotion.

Rising subscription costs for libraries affect what they can purchase

  • Rising costs of subscriptions: The costs for libraries of institutional journal subscriptions have outpaced inflation due to factors such as increasing research output and added costs of electronic publishing. Libraries spend an increasing percentage of their budgets on a smaller number of resources. The increase in the absolute number of journals published globally makes it impossible for libraries to provide all the subscriptions their users may want.
  • Commercial ownership of scholarly journals: Commercial publishers control a higher percentage of journals than ever before. Smaller society publishers have been unable to keep up with the technical requirements and costs of publishing in the electronic environment. Mergers between commercial publishers and takeovers of smaller publishers mean that a few major companies control a majority of scholarly publishing. These publishers are concerned primarily with profit rather than scholarly dissemination.
  • Electronic publishing has brought new pricing schemes: Bundling of electronic journals into "Big Deals" is common, and libraries have purchased these in an attempt to save money. While such deals decrease the cost per journal for libraries, they also lock up large portions of library budgets. Pricing can involve FTE, tiers, number of simultaneous users, and sites.
  • Monographs and other books are now sometimes sold as subscriptions: Some publishers are bundling books in packages and selling to libraries as subscriptions. This is especially true in subjects like the health sciences. These subscription costs take up an increasing percentage of library budgets.

The market for scholarly monographs is shrinking

  • Libraries are purchasing packages of electronic monographs: To maximize budgets, libraries are purchasing packages of electronic scholarly monographs from certain vendors and publishers and purchasing a smaller percentage of the niche, hardcopy, and specialty monographic literature from smaller publishers.
  • Individual scholars rely on library-purchased materials in the electronic environment and are purchasing fewer scholarly monographs than when they were only available in hardcopy.

Licensing places restrictions on the use of electronic materials

  • Libraries have always relied on interlibrary loan to get researchers access to materials that their institution does not have. With electronic books and journals, publishers have added license restrictions that never existed for print books. Over time these restrictions diminish the ability to make as much scholarship as possible available to researchers.
  • With these same licenses, publishers also place more restrictions on the use of electronic materials for classes, course packs, and reserves than they could for print materials. Ironically, this means that, while electronic materials are more accessible for students, in practice, instructors must navigate a number of restrictions on use of electronic materials.