The Scholarly Communication Crisis Setting the Scene

1
The Scholarly Communication Crisis Setting the
Scene

• Frances Boyle
• Oxford University Library Services

2
The Scene..

• Context
• Cultural Shifts
• Market Place Dynamic
• Facts
• Why Now?
• Emerging Initiatives/Technologies

3
Context Cultural Shifts

• Rapid changes in core business of TL and
  research
• User numbers increasing, profile changing..
• Reassess realign service priorities
• Vf M - accountability, affordability
• Maximising investment institutional level
• Create, give away, buy back
• Facilitate expedite the dissemination of
  access to scholarly information

4
Context Market Place Dynamic

• Market place dynamic - no. of players increasing
  diversifying relations changing
• Serials crisis much vaunted term rather
  simplistic
• Economic models - escalating cost, unstable
  immature
• 2000-2001 23 of publishers changed pricing
  model
• 2001-2002 24 again

5
Context Facts

• ARL (86-99) - 2.7 spend increase purchase 6
  fewer titles
• LISU UK title ? 8.42 96-98
• APR inflation rate lt 3
• Ejournal deals costs gt100 for lt 20 increase in
  coverage over the last year
• Mean inflation for local deals 8
• Cost of 5 large ejournal packages gt100k

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Traditional Economic Model
7
Impetus Why Now? - 1

• Aggressive mergers
• Growth of powerful consortia
• Current situation not sustainable
• Explosion of published material particularly in
  STM
• Mixed economy of the hybrid world libraries are
  maintaining both print electronic collections

8
Impetus Why Now? - 2

• Publishers aggregators e.g. Elsevier
  ScienceDirect
• Subscription agents as gateways
• AI databases as gateways to the fulltext
• Subject driven online communities e.g. EiVillage,
  ChemWeb, BioMedNet
• Academic community as publishers
• New competitive forces

9
Impetus Why Now? - 3

• Digital world
• raises profile more transparent
• issues reported in press THES/Nature debate
• empowerment of the user community
• debate into future e-access to the 1º lit.
• Global shared problem for all stakeholders

10
Emerging. - 1

• Library community initiatives
• SPARC
• CURL etc. etc..
• Academic community initiatives
• ELSSS, the Electronic Society for Social
  Scientist
• Public Library of Science
• Preprint/eprints services etc. etc..

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Emerging - 2

• Publisher initiatives
• PubMed Central
• E-BioSci
• New players
• Budapest Open Access Initiative
• OAI - Open Archives Initiative
• DOI, XML..

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Useful Links

• Steven Harnard _at_
• http//cogsci.soton.ac.uk/harnard
• Public Library of Science
• http//www.publiclibraryofscience.org/
• ELSSS _at_
• http//www.elsss.org.uk/