Buy, Build, or Lease: Managing Serials for Scholarly Communications

A Shifting Mosaic of Scholarly Publishing, Scientific Delivery, and Future Impact Changing the Face of Learned Societies

“…With recent mergers, 3 publishers (Elsevier, Springer, and Taylor and Francis) now control the majority of peer-reviewed commercial STM journals. At least initially, some substantial price increases occurred and appeared to be based more on market power than real costs (Bosch 2005;McCabe 2002;Willinsky 2003). Even the promise of cost savings from bundled or individual serials in a digital format has not materialized uniformly (Bergstrom and Bergstrom 2006;Miller and Harris 2004).…”

“…The push for free open access by some governmental agencies and a considerable number of research scientists (Rowlands and Nicholas 2005) will complicate further the economic picture for commercial and nonprofit STM publishers (Regazzi 2004). The future economics of these dynamics have yet to be resolved (Bosch 2005), but without change that involves cooperation among scholars, editors, publishers, and subscribers, some believe that they cannot be sustained (Miller and Harris 2004). Nonprofit scientific societies would seem to be at the greatest risk of economic uncertainty and delivery challenges.…”

“…Likely because of such economics (Bosch 2005;Harrington 2005), open access has been very slow to evolve; only about 2% of published STM articles were open access in 2004 (Regazzi 2004). Further, the important role of members of learned societies to establish a presence in a particular domain of science and foster their influence by unification around societal goals suggests that the standard membership fee-subscription model for their serials will not disappear easily (Gannon 2005).…”