On Monday 4th March I attended a seminar on the `Science Journals Crisis' organised by the University of Edinburgh Library. It was part of an initiative by CURL (Consortium of University and Research Libraries) to raise awareness of the crisis (which since I, at least, wasn't previously aware of it would seem to be needed). The main speaker was Julia Blixrud from SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) in the US and there were several local speakers.
It appears that there is something of a crisis in academic publishing, with, on one hand, dramatic increases in the price of (some) journals and an increasing number of journals, and, on the other, a static (or even declining) library acquisitions budget. Whilst on-line versions of journals offer new possibilities they also incur additional expenses, typically an additional subscription. A number of initiatives, in place, planned or possible, were discussed. They typically involved setting up not-for-profit publications of one sort or another, often using an electronic rather than a paper medium. Another possibility was electronic `journal repositories', similar to the physics and astronomy pre-print archives.
The seminar was rather more about the spiraling cost of journals and alternative models for publication, and less about the technical challenges and opportunities of electronic publication (which is at least slightly relevant to AstroGrid) than I had hoped. Nonetheless, I suppose that it doesn't do any harm to be peripherally aware of these issues.
CURL briefing on the crisis: http://www.lib.ed.ac.uk/lib/news/curldoc.html
SPARC: http://www.arl.org/sparc
`Tempe Principles': http://www.arl.org/scomm/tempe.html
Budapest Open Access Initiative: http://www.soros.org/openaccess/
Clive Davenhall,
11/3/02.