Responding to Unsustainable Journal Costs: A CARL Brief | Canadian Association of Research Libraries

peter.suber's bookmarks 2018-02-16

Summary:

"This brief provides an overview for Canadian university administrators of the current problematic state of scholarly journal costs, and proposes some recommendations to address the situation.

Current Situation. Over the past several years, a convergence of escalating subscription costs, unfavourable exchange rates, and tightening budgets at Canadian universities has put a spotlight on the unsustainable economic environment of scholarly journals. In 2015, the Ontario Council of University Libraries outlined the problem in a letter to vendors....In 2016, CARL issued a similar statement, asserting that we are in a perfect storm of factors.2 Many Canadian library acquisition budgets cannot stretch any further — bringing us to a point where we must consider new strategies and responses....

We suggest several actions to Canadian universities to help address the problem of unsustainable prices of scholarly journals:

1. Support libraries and consortia in taking a strong stance against unreasonable price increases and publisher lock-in.

2. Raise awareness of the issues with the broader academic community. When researchers and administrators support solutions, libraries are in a stronger position.

3. Raise awareness with other stakeholders about the inherent limitations of impact measures such as journal impact factor, and work with them to define a broader range of assessment measures that more accurately reflect research quality, impact and value.

4. Invest in sustainable scholarly publishing platforms, services and infrastructure that support the needs of researchers and provide practical alternatives to the existing system. Libraries are already working nationally and internationally to develop this infrastructure, but will need support for redistributing funds towards new models."

 

Link:

http://www.carl-abrc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/CARL_Brief_Subscription_Costs_en.pdf

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » peter.suber's bookmarks
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Tags:

oa.new oa.canada oa.hei oa.strategies oa.prices oa.gold oa.budgets oa.big_deals oa.negotiations oa.librarians oa.libass oa.advocacy oa.metrics oa.recommendations oa.awareness oa.infrastructure oa.publishing oa.libraries oa.journals

Date tagged:

02/16/2018, 16:07

Date published:

02/16/2018, 11:07