About the UB Scholarly Communications Group:

The University at Buffalo Scholarly Communication Group meets regularly to consider trends in existing and emerging publication modalities and to form an education and research agenda based on the needs and practices of UB faculty. "Publishing the Future: Scholarly Communication in an Information Age" is the first in a series of campus conferences to inform and initialize campus awareness of critical transformations in the scholarly communication arena.

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Overview
Academic publishing and scholarly communication more generally are undergoing a period of rapid change. University faculty members are aware of some of this change. They are widely aware, for example, of the email, online catalogs, key word searchable indexes, and citation services that have become ubiquitous over the past decade. And faculty members too are widely aware of the pressure being put on library budgets along with university budgets nationwide. But much more than this is going on, some positive and some negative. And it warrants attention.

Regarding technology, new scholarly information systems offer far more than electronic bibliographies, indexes and citation services. New tools of scholarly communication are proliferating. Regarding budgets, the pressures now exerted on libraries are unique. They are not limited to declining state revenues but also to dramatically increasing prices. And these price rises are due not only to rising technology costs but to rising costs for books and serials. Put together, budget pressures and innovation in information technology are raising the pace of change to levels simultaneously fascinating and alarming.

New information systems serving scholarship and artistic expression are coming online every day. The Inter-University Consortium for Social and Political Research at the University of Michigan provides online access to a vast archive of social science data to over 500 member organizations including universities, rightly referring to itself as "an integral part of the infrastructure of social science research." Originally a tape library, ICPSR now offers major support in technical services, networking, and web-development.

Online institutional repositories, such as MIT’s Dspace, are being used to store a wide array of university output in digital form, including preprints, technical reports, working papers, conference papers, images, and more. This information serves multiple purposes. It serves to make information freely available as a public resource, while it also builds institutional memory and promotes the University.

Much of this is in addition to traditional publishing, but not all. Online servers are being used in certain fields in place of traditional publishing. Some physicists, such as string theorists, rely little on journals for research purposes in part due to slow turnaround time. They rely instead on a repository of unrefereed manuscripts distributed over a Los Alamos server.

Knowledge management systems are being used to facilitate research among geographically distributed institutions through data sharing, imaging, and chat systems. Using weblogs, or online journals, individual scholars increasingly share their thinking on daily basis. The number of scholarly journals has grown by over 50 percent in the past fifteen years, increasingly including online journals.

Paradoxically, at the same time as information is flowing more freely than ever before in some respects, it is being curtailed as never before in others. Skyrocketing costs for academic journals have forced a nationwide cutback in the average number of periodicals held by academic libraries. Since 1988, scholarly journal costs have increased at three times the rate of general inflation (64% for CPI vs. 227% for journals). Health care prices, often cited for out-of-control costs, rose a comparatively tame 107 percent.

To cover cost increases library journal budgets at the average academic library increased two times since the mid-1980’s. Yet despite increased budgets, libraries have been forced to diminish their holdings. Journal titles purchased by academic libraries have decreased by 6 percent. In addition worldwide sales of research-level scholarly books have plummeted from an average of 1,500 copies in the early 1990’s to less than 500 copies. The number of books acquired by U.S. academic libraries fell over this time period by 26 percent.

The effects are local. The serials budget at UB’s Health Science Library (HSL) increased 162 percent during the 1990s, while the number of titles dropped 35 percent. Over this same period of time journal prices outside HSL followed a similar pattern of increased costs. General science serials costs have increased 287 percent. Geography 307 percent. Political science 198 percent.

Why is this happening? The view widely held among library administrators and scholarly societies attributes alarming price increases to pricing controls made possible by concentration of ownership in the publishing industry. By 1998, commercial publishers had consolidated down from dozens of players to 13 major companies. Since then, in just 5 years, merger activity has reduced this down to 7 companies. High priced commercial publishers now control 68 percent of the scientific, technical, and medical publishing market.

Public profit statements show breathtaking profit margins in this industry. As comparative year 2002 data indicate: Petroleum and Coal Products – 7.4 percent profit. Beverages and Tobacco – 10.1 percent. Pharmaceuticals – 16.7 percent. Commercial Scientific Journal Publishers – greater than 30 percent profit. Regular printers – 1.7 percent. In addition to increased prices for individual journals, large publishers increasingly bundle journal offerings and require term (e.g. 3 year) contracts thus further reducing options for collection development.

All this change has direct implications for scholarly productivity and promotion of individual scholars. Certain research benefits are obvious. New communication tools facilitate research. Others are less obvious, at least until now. It is becoming clear that works published online are often highly read, presumably because they are easily obtained. And systems like CiteSeer make it much easier to learn who is citing one’s work, in what fields and for what reasons. In a period of time such as this, scholars are advised to learn sooner about powerful new systems coming online. There is a tendency among many scholars to think they are aware of tools useful for work in their own fields of specialty. But this is not necessarily the case. Many scholars’ knowledge of new and useful systems lags behind new developments by months and even years. A conscious effort to keep abreast of about new systems could lead to significant improvements in research productivity.

It also appears that new systems may impact promotion. There is no need for online publishing to undermine the peer review process. However, prominent librarians and university administrators have proposed that publication and peer review be de-linked. In this case, peer review would take place for materials placed on Web accessible file servers and not published at all in hard copy. This would free up scholarly review from dependence on publishing firms. This is likely to upset the informal but very real status rankings of journals in at least some fields.

Academic libraries certainly are changing, morphing from brick & mortar collection repositories into centers of technical excellence. Initiatives such as Open Archives, a movement to craft interoperable information systems, represent the library profession’s understanding that the free flow of information has determinants in what Lawrence Lessig calls "the code." The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) is a "worldwide alliance of research institutions and libraries… searching for new solutions to scientific journal publishing," including low-cost online publishing.

Using tools such as these libraries are leveraging new technologies to get the most bang for their buck. Scholarly societies are beginning to understand the potential benefits to their members of working with organizations like SPARC. Individual scholars are working with non-profit organizations such as the Public Library of Science to make "the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource."

Productive responses to unanticipated change are underway, but we have a long way to go. Even after budget problems are solved, keeping abreast of new developments will be a career long process, a journey. "Publishing the Future: Information Access and the Academy," is intended to launch a series of periodic events designed to help UB and its scholarly community along on this journey.

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