Scholarly Communication in the Internet Age
A Faculty Forum

Wednesday, March 9, 2005
12:00-1:00 pm Nedderman Hall, Room 100

Rick Johnson, SPARC® Enterprise director

Abstract: Like every industry touched by the Internet, breathtaking change is underway in journal publishing and scholarly communication generally. What are the forces driving change? What are the opportunities for scholars, scientists, academic institutions, research funders, and other key stakeholders? What role will "open access" strategies play? How can you contribute to positive change? These questions and more will be examined by our speaker, Richard K. Johnson, Director SPARC (Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition)

Presentation sponsored by UT Arlington Library. Free and open to all.

For more informmation, please contact Gerald Saxon, saxon@uta.edu or Mary Castle, castle@uta.edu

Missed the presentation? - Download Powerpoint or View FlashPaper

Bio

Rick Johnson is the Director of SPARC® -- the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition -- an international alliance of more than 300 academic and research libraries that was established as a means of igniting change in scholarly communication. Since launching SPARC® in 1998, Rick has worked to promote new models for journal publishing, especially in the sciences. Under his leadership, SPARC® has undertaken dozens of successful publishing initiatives and advocacy programs.

Recently, Rick played a central role in mobilizing Congressional and public support for the landmark National Institutes of Health "Enhanced Public Access" plan. He also was one of the creators of the Budapest Open Access Initiative and the Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing. Currently he serves on the Governing Board of Cornell University's Project Euclid math publishing initiative, and he just completed a three-year appointment to the Advisory Board of NIH's PubMed Central. He is co-founder and a member of the board of BioOne, a digital publishing platform in the biosciences.

Before joining SPARC®, Rick was a publishing executive with LexisNexis, and served as Senior Vice President of Congressional Information Service and University Publications of America.

Image courtesy of SPARC®

The Scholarly Communication Crisis

Scholarly communication is the process by which research or new knowledge is created and refined, evaluated, disseminated and preserved. One of the primary benefits of institutions of higher education is to share findings that create an informed community and to promote the discovery of knowledge for the public good. There are many means of informal communication but the formal means of scholarly communication has been through publishing. It is this formal system that is in crisis and no longer meets the needs of the scholarly community at large.

Statement of the Problem

The Crisis in scholarly communication can be described by the following issues:

• faculty who add most of the value to scholarly communication are losing control of their system to commercial publishers;
• the volume of scholarly output continues to increase rapidly and the libraries' abilities to preserve access to scholarly information is decreasing;
• mergers in the publishing world reduce competition and promote journal price inflation;
• double-digit price increases for scholarly journals over several decades makes it impossible for libraries to support the needs of their faculty and students.

Background

Scholars who produce, ensure quality and consume the results of scholarly communication are losing control of the system. Much of their research, which is funded by their institutions or by government grants, is signed over to publishers who sell the information back to the university often at exorbitant prices in the form of journals. Often faculty members lose rights to use their own research in the classroom.

Commercial publishers recognize the profitability in publishing scholarly research and have increased their control over use and distribution of information. Many titles that were previously published by not-for-profit associations and societies have been purchased by commercial publishers who charge considerably more. Consolidation and mergers in the publishing industry has resulted in a small number of conglomerates controlling a large portion of scholarly journal publishing. These international firms are mainly concerned with profits and not with the broadest possible dissemination of information.

For some years, libraries have faced a serials crisis. Prices of science, technology and medical journals trippled within a ten-year period. This, combined with the fact that budgets have not kept pace with the explosion of scholarly resources, prevents faculty, students and researchers from accessing important relevant literature. This crisis is NOT a library issue. Rather, it is an issue for the entire academic community because it is impacting how research is disseminated, at what costs, and with what restrictions.

This web page provides selected links to other resources with additional information about scholarly communication changes and the open access movement.

Links

• SPARC® - http://www.arl.org/sparc
• Scholarly Communication - http://www.arl.org/scomm
• Create Change - http://www.createchange.org
• NIH Public Access Policy - http://www.nih.gov/about/publicaccess/index.htm
• Cornell University Library - http://www.library.cornell.edu/scholarlycomm/problem.html
• University of Maryland Libraries - http://www.lib.umd.edu/ETC/scholar_comm.html
• Open Access Brochure - Download PDF or View FlashPaper
• Dean of UT Arlington Library Presentation - Download Powerpoint or View FlashPaper

Open Access Bibliography

The Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals presents over 1,300 selected English-language books, conference papers (including some digital video presentations), debates, editorials, e-prints, journal and magazine articles, news articles, technical reports, and other printed and electronic sources that are useful in understanding the open access movement's efforts to provide free access to and unfettered use of scholarly literature.

Most sources have been published between 1999 and August 31, 2004; however, a limited number of key sources published prior to 1999 are also included. Where possible, links are provided to sources that are freely available on the Internet (approximately 78 percent of the bibliography's references have such links).

http://info.lib.uh.edu/cwb/oab.pdf

This bibliography has been published as a printed book (ISBN 1-59407-670-7) by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL).

http://www.arl.org/pubscat/pubs/openaccess/

ARL and the author have made the above PDF version of the bibliography freely available. It is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License.