Reforming Scholarly Publishing in the Sciences: A Librarian Perspective

Introduction: The Librarian’s View of the Scholarly Publication System Research librarians—that is, librarians who work in large college, university, and private research libraries—today face the difficult challenge of managing their collections and information services during a period of crisis and profound change in scholarly publications. This crisis and change affect all fields of knowledge, but the sciences, including mathematics, are front and center in defining the stresses and innovations that are shaking the foundations of the established, scholarly publication system. Research librarians at present are particularly concerned about three issues in scholarly publishing. First, there is the very specific but seemingly intractable problem of reversing, or at least containing, the rapidly rising cost of scientific journal subscriptions. Librarians often describe this as the “serials crisis” in scholarly publications. Second, there is growing concern among research librarians that revisions to local, national, and international information policies and procedures governing intellectual property rights may threaten the free flow of information in scholarly communications. And finally, there is the overriding librarian preoccupation with the applications and effects of new information technology. Will the new digital information system fundamentally change the scholarly publication system and the research librarian’s role in it? Will new information technology help solve troubling current economic and structural problems in scholarly publication or merely exacerbate these problems? The sheer volume of scholarly publication, the rising cost of this scholarship (particularly in the sciences), and the dizzying array of new options brought about by advances in information technology all conspire to make this an exciting and difficult time to be a research librarian. Underlying this tumultuous change and challenge is the fundamental question of who owns scholarly publications. Ownership is key to both the cost and accessibility of scholarship in the traditional print information system as well as in the emerging digital information system. Research librarians, as this essay will document, are increasingly troubled by the growing commercialization of scholarship in the sciences, where authors assign their copyrights to commercial publishers. By placing ownership of publications outside the circle of the academy, scholars run the risk of making their works unaffordable and unavailable to research libraries. Research librarians and their concerns, of course, form only a subset of the players and issues in the overall scholarly publication system. The librarian perspective on problems and solutions in scholarly publication is important, but this perspective must be viewed in the context of an overall system which, at least until the present time, has depended on the interplay of authors, publishers, librarians, and readers in a highly interdependent process. The potential, in light of the new digital information system, for changing the roles of the respective players in the process is, in fact, one of the underlying stresses in scholarly Joseph J. Branin is dean of libraries at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. His e-mail address is [email protected].