The Library began the first of its new initiatives to create a dialogue with the campus when it jointly hosted a Symposium on Scholarly Communication with the Senate Committee on the Library on April 18. We plan to host many more of these sessions, which will include specific topics of interest, throughout the next academic year. At the first meeting, members of the departmental library advisory committees were invited to examine how scholars on campus can make a difference in helping to harness the skyrocketing costs of the research publications that are so important to their work. Speakers included Provost Richard Herman, Professor Ward Henson, chair of the Campus Promotion and Tenure Committee, and Professor Alexander Scheeline, chair of the Senate Committee on the Library. The growing gap between the price of scholarly materials and the ability of libraries to pay for items that are needed by students and faculty is a problem for the University community and for the scholarly community at large.
Several factors complicate the situation.
The explosion in the output of scholarly research, the increase of publications available in both digital and printed formats, and the steady rise in prices make it increasingly less possible for the Library to acquire all the materials you and your students need. One of the major reasons for the increase in prices of serial publications has been the change in the nature of the publishers that furnish scholarly titles. Journals that were once published by professional societies have been taken over by commercial publishers. The free transfer of exclusive copyrights by authors to journal publishers is also an important contributor to the increase in the cost of accessing scholarly information. Not only can authors usually not use their own work without the publisher s permission, but the universities in effect give away valuable materials that they then must buy back.