Links on Scholarly Communication

Monographic and Serials Costs in ARL libraries, 1986-2000: http://www.arl.org/stats/arlstat/graphs/2000t2.html

EBSCO serials prices 1998-2002 with projections for 2003: http://www-us.ebsco.com/home/printsubs/priceproj.asp

2. Some Alternative Publishing Options and Experiments.

The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC): http://www.arl.org/sparc/core/index.asp?page=a0">
An increasingly successfuleffort to create journals that will compete with specific, highly priced journals.

Cornell E-Print Archive: http://arxiv.org/
A very active archive for pre-prints, mainly in physics.  This is probably the single most successful effort to date to create a new method of exchanging high quality scholarly information.

DSpace (MIT): http://web.mit.edu/dspace/live/home.html
A repository for use by MIT scholars.

Cornell Technical Reports Repository: at http://techreports.library.cornell.edu
A repository for use by Cornell scholars.

E-Scholarship (Univ. of California):  http://escholarship.cdlib.org/
A kind of launch pad for scholarly electronic information.

BioMed Central: http://www.biomedcentral.com/
A very innovative commercial service that makes refereed journals freely accessible to the world.

FIGARO: http://www.figaro-europe.net/index.html
An electronic publishing platform for European scholarship.

Budapest Open Access Initiative: http://www.soros.org/openaccess/
A new program that calls for self-archiving by scholars and the creation of new, open-access journals.

Public Library of Science: http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org/
An agreement by scholars not to publish in journals that do not make their articles freely accessible within six months of publication.

3. Publishing Costs in the Humanities.

“Special Letter from the President of the Modern Language Association: Call for Action in Scholarly Book Publishing” (in “featured content”): www.mla.org

4. Two key overviews by Jean-Claude Guédon:

“Beyond Core Journals and Licenses: The Paths to Reform Scientific Publishing”  (ARL Newsletter 218): http://www.arl.org/newsltr/218/guedon.html

In Oldenburg’s Long Shadow: Librarians, Research Scientists, Publishers, and the Control of Scientific Publishing http://www.arl.org/arl/proceedings/138/guedon.html