The Librarians' Dilemma: Contemplating the Costs of the "Big Deal" (2001)

"The most important thing that librarians can do to change the rules of the game is to invest in bold new experiments in scholarly communication; by which experiments I mean The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) partners such as MIT CogNet, BioOne, Columbia Earthscape, New Journal of Physics, Project Euclid, and others.

In investing in these new forms of scholarly communication, we are steadily building the publishing infrastructure so that future scholars may never have to publish in an expensive commercial journal in order to be academically successful. Despite the fact that we are spending a small percentage of our budgets compared to the Big Deals, these initiatives are profoundly subversive to the commercial publishing system -- and the commercial publishers know it...."