While all colleges and universities are suffering from the ever increasing cost of journal subscriptions, small libraries tend to suffer the most. Rose-Hulman’s already small journal budget was recently threatened with being cut by 1/3. Luckily extra funding has been pulled together and so some hard decisions have been diverted for at least one more year. It is widely accepted that the current scholarly publishing model cannot sustain itself. Much attention has been given to the open access movement as a possible solution. Open access journals have spawned concerns about quality of the research and the peer review process, and the economic viability of open access journals. A common practice of open access journals is to charge authors a fee, usually ranging from $500 to $3,000 to publish an article. The obvious challenge for universities is how to manage this new cost on top of already enormous subscription costs. Five leading universities including Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard, MIT and UC Berkeley have signed the “Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity” pledging to develop systems to pay open access journals for the articles they publish by the institutions’ scholars. While it remains to be seen how this is to be done, the hope is to create a system which allows for less reliance on journal subscriptions and to have a market impact to lower subscription cost, or level the playing field.
So how does this effect small college libraries? Well, immediately it doesn’t since it is mostly larger universities that have the financial resources to cover some of the costly publication fees. Researchers from smaller colleges need to reply mostly on grant money to support such publications, something not in abundance for humanities and social science research. As a librarian at a small college, my hope is that these larger universities will be able to have a positive impact on the economic models for open access journals which will someday trickle down to smaller colleges while at the same time lowering prices for commercial journals. I can only hope.
Further information can be viewed in an Inside Higher Ed article.
Posted by Richard Bernier 
