The High Cost of Scholarly Journals (And What To Do About It)

"Why do scholarly journals cost so much? Is it the high costs of publishing or something else? Most importantly, what can be done? These questions have grown in importance over the past several years, but they have assumed new urgency given the extremely tight budgets facing most universities today....

Perhaps the question should be: Despite high prices and inflation, why shouldn’t journal prices simply be left to the unfettered private market, like most other prices in our economy? We believe that the answer is that an unexamined reliance on the market has helped create a crisis in scholarly communications. Unless something is done to reverse the situation, serious and perhaps irreparable harm will be done to the nation’s research and scholarly enterprise....