The crisis in scholarly publishing and the role of the academic library

Spiraling costs and stagnant library budgets have made the acquisition of scholarly publications unsustainable for most academic institutions. Costs for subscription journals, in particular, have risen dramatically over the past thirty years. With the advent of a networked system of communications, however, many academic librarians have heralded the electronic journal as the salvation of scholarly publishing. An increasing number of librarians have proposed the idea that libraries, in cooperation with their academic departments and university presses, should assume the role of publisher as one solution to the deepening crisis. This article documents the serial crisis in-depth, explores whether librarians-as-publishers is indeed a good idea, and examines the state of the electronic journal in academe, particularly the extent to which digital serials have been accepted as legitimate research vehicles among scholars. In addition, the author suggests a number of methods individual academic librarians can employ to improve the acceptability of electronic journals so that they can eventually serve as low cost alternatives of scholarly information, and examines steps libraries can take collectively to deal with commercial publishers.Ope