Competition and cooperation: Libraries and publishers in the transition to electronic scholarly journals

TL;DR

The paper analyzes how the rapid digital transition of scholarly journals influences the roles and strategies of publishers and libraries, highlighting potential shifts in functions and economic impacts in the scholarly communication ecosystem.

Contribution

It provides an analysis of publishers' strategies in digital transition and their implications for library functions and the scholarly publishing landscape.

Findings

Publishers may take over library functions in digital format.

The journal crisis is primarily a library cost issue, not publisher pricing.

Digital conversion offers publishers a chance to increase revenues while improving services.

Abstract

The conversion of scholarly journals to digital format is proceeding rapidly, especially for those from large commercial and learned society publishers. This conversion offers the best hope for survival for such publishers. The infamous "journal crisis" is more of a library cost crisis than a publisher pricing problem, with internal library costs much higher than the amount spent on purchasing books and journals. Therefore publishers may be able to retain or even increase their revenues and profits, while at the same time providing a superior service. To do this, they will have to take over many of the function of libraries, and they can do that only in the digital domain. This paper examines publishers' strategies, how they are likely to evolve, and how they will affect libraries.