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December 02, 2008
Future of IR's
One problem for academic libraries that seems to just not want to go away is that of escalating costs of academic journals. I have heard statistics like over half of the dollar amount that universities spend on these journals goes towards the professional organizations that publish them. In other words, half of the price of a given journal is not even being put towards the cost of publishing the journal. All this makes me wonder whether universities have considered rebelling against this current structure and encouraging their faculty to publish their papers exclusively to their institutional repositories.
I am aware that the journal structure is sill the backbone of the academic publishing industry, however one can imagine a scenario whereby, over a period of time, academic institutions combine the strength of their open access IR's with the strength of their brand name to supersede the longstanding clutch journals have had on the market. In this way, those schools that have renown in a particular field will emerge is natural substitutes for a equivalent journal of the same field.
If we wanted to stretch the definition of an IR even further we could turn our attention in the direction of the university press. Because it is expected that faculty, those in the humanities in particular, publish books, we have a system of university presses that publish books of distinguished professors from all over. However, this process is rather expensive for the library as well, and if I'm not mistaken, most universities subsidize their presses, operating them at a loss. Could it be possible to expand our IR's to include these materials as well, making them more open and lowering the printing costs in the process?
Just a few thoughts I didn't manage to fit into my IR assignment and thought the Scholarly Comm. blog would be an appropriate forum.
-Published by Greg Hall
for IS 560: Management and Development of Collections
Posted by colldev at December 2, 2008 02:06 PM