- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
I work in a science library at a major US research university, and it's been clear to us librarians that the scholarly publishing system is broken for some time. We are, after all, the major consumer base for scientific publishers, and since we're publicly funded institutions, most of us have had to deal with flat or diminishing budgets over the past few years. Yet prices for journal subscriptions go up every year, at a rate faster than inflation, leaving us with no choice but to cut subscriptions to lesser-used or less-prestigious journals in order to keep journals that our researchers can't live without (like, say, Nature) or out of the inability to cut titles from large publishers due to the terms of the "big deals" that we sign with them. Even institutions like mine only have so much leverage to bargain with these publishers, since they are the exclusive providers of the content - they have us over a barrel. Is Open Access the answer? I don't know. But something has to change.
