An Alternative with New Challenges Electronic publication offers the opportunity of greatly improved access to information, with the ability to search and manipulate information far more flexibly than in the print environment. Electronic information is not free. Commercial publishers often charge as much or more for electronic publications as for print counterparts. Delivering electronic publications to the campus requires expenditures for equipment and networking that demand frequent upgrades in response to rapid technological change. Many of the electronic resources available on your campus are governed by licenses which often restrict how you and your students can use the content, and prevent or severely limit the ability of libraries to share journal articles and other information through interlibrary loan.
Libraries are concerned with long-term preservation and archiving issues raised by electronic media.
In the Marketplace Commercial journal publishers are expanding their market control through acquisitions, mergers, and the purchase of individual titles from learned scholarly societies. University presses reject quality manuscripts with limited market potential because they cannot recover their costs. Subsidies from granting agencies and universities for publishing in the humanities have virtually disappeared in the last 15 years. Loss of Control Through Copyright Copyright transfer agreements often require you to transfer exclusively all of your copyrights to the publisher, thereby losing control forever of any subsequent public distribution of your research. Proposed copyright legislation supported by some commercial publishers seeks to restrict access to electronic information even more severely.