Library and Information Science Commons^™

Global Changes In Scholarly Communication, Suzanne E. Thorin

Libraries' and Librarians' Publications

For more than a decade, the cost of print and electronic journals, particularly in the sciences, has increased rapidly at the same time that the amount of research being reported via published articles has grown exponentially. With academic libraries being less and less able to purchase the journals needed for their communities, the use of the term scholarly communication has evolved to illustrate the breakdown of the process of traditional scholarly publication; that is, as a means to disseminate research results, the present system of scholarly communication can no longer meet the needs of the scholarly community at large.

When …