REASON, RISK, AND REWARD: Models for Libraries and Other Stakeholders in an Evolving Scholarly Publishing Ecosystem

Scholarly publishing, and scholarly communication more generally, are based on patterns established over many decades and even centuries. Some of these patterns are clearly valuable and intimately related to core values of the academy, but others were based on the exigencies of the past, and new opportunities have brought into question whether it makes sense to persist in supporting old models. New technologies and new publishing models raise the question of how we should fund and operate scholarly publishing and scholarly communication in the future, moving away from a scarcity model based on the exchange of physical goods that restricts access to scholarly literature unless a market-based exchange takes place. This essay describes emerging REASON, RISK, AND REWARD 235 models that attempt to shift scholarly communication to a more open-access and mission-based approach and that try to retain control of scholarship by academics and the institutions and scholarly societies that support them. It explores changing practices for funding scholarly journals and changing services provided by academic libraries, changes instituted with the end goal of providing more access to more readers, stimulating new scholarship, and removing inefficiencies from a system ready for change. [scholarly publishing; scholarly communication; open access; libraries] NOTES 1. For a critique of the utility of the impact factor, see Priem et al. 2010. 2. An earlier discussion of this possibility can be found in Priem and Hemminger 2012. 3. An explanation of the Duke Libraries COPE fund can be found at http://library. duke.edu/research/openaccess/cope. More detail is provided by Stuart Shieber (2009) of the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication. 4. A list of the fees charged by Hindawi can be found on their website. See http:// www.hindawi.com/apc/. 5. The fee for publishing in Cell Reports can be found on the CellPress website. See http://www.cell.com/cell-reports/faq. 6. The recently formed Library Publishing Coalition published a directory in 2012 that lists almost 600 library-published journals, which is available at http://www. librarypublishing.org/resources/directory-library-publishing-services. 7. See http://www.arl.org/about. 8. Morrison’s post is part of an ongoing series on the transition to open access. 9. For more information about the Public Library of Science (PloS), see http:// www.plosone.org/.