The Transformation of Scholarly Communication Into Big Business Scholarly communication has been transformed from a means of communicating research results to a multi-billion dollar business. Each year, commercial publishers expand their control of the scholarly communication market through acquisitions and mergers. A significant means of expansion is the purchase of individual titles from scholarly societies. It is not unreasonable to assume that all North American libraries will be spending four billion dollars on journals alone by 2015, assuming they continue to receive current levels of support.
Profit is difficult to calculate from the outside of any industry.
It is further complicated in the scholarly communication business by the fact that most commercial scholarly publishing companies are, in fact, only one part of a much larger company. These savings would have paid for all journal subscriptions for 61 research libraries. Here the differences can be quite dramatic. In economics, commercially published journals were almost four times more expensive. The System Is Fragile Though scholarly communication has become a large-scale, profitable business, it is, in fact, a very fragile system.