The expulsion of scientific journals from the Edenic world of scholarly-society publishing comes as no surprise to those who have tracked the commercialization of research during the past few decades. Science is big business. In this brave new world where market forces, not fellowships, drive research, the emergence of the scientific journal as profit maker is one of publishing's best-kept secrets. And that development is holding back the march of science. When libraries cut back on subscriptions because of high journal prices, the journals that remain in circulation make up for the falling subscriptions by raising their rates.
Faculty suffer from reduced availability of research materials.
And when libraries cut subscriptions to journals published by scholarly societies, the subscription fees these societies usually reinvest in science also disappear. Science for scientists has become an endangered concept. Although journals are produced through the labor of researchers who contribute their time and skill for the benefit of their professional community, the net effect is a contribution to commercial publishers' high profits. But research libraries are under intense pressure to subscribe to journals in which their science faculty publish, regardless of the expense. Profit or Perish For a few years, according to Mary Case, director of scholarly communications at the ARL, the price of science journals rose so high that librarians had no choice but to cut acquisition of monographs in the humanities and social sciences.