More about the problem:
Why will there be less access for researchers to the published literature in the future?
The costs of institutional journal subscriptions for libraries has increased far beyond general inflation and continues to rise. (see graph from the Association of Research Libraries and list of articles on this topic)
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Commercial publishers, rather than scholarly societies or nonprofit publishers now control a much higher percentage of journals than ever before. Mergers between commercial publishers mean that a few major publishers control a majority of scholarly journals being published. These publishers' main goal is profit rather than scholarly dissemination. (see further reading)
- Electronic publishing has brought new pricing schemes: bundling of journals so that one must subscribe to a package in order to get access to a journal, tiered pricing for electronic access based on institutional researcher FTE numbers, extra charges for remote access. All of these pricing issues never existed in the past with print subscriptions and usually result in much higher costs for electronic journals than their print counterparts.
Therefore, university libraries, such as the MSU Libraries, will be able to afford to purchase fewer and fewer journals over time while the increase in scholarship and publishing mean that there are more and more journals being published. Where once university libraries could buy collections that represented a large percentage of the published literature, now they must often settle for smaller collections of only the most critical materials.
MSU Faculty members: You may ask, which journals are reasonably priced and which are not? This is a difficult question because prices for electronic journal packages vary from institution to institution and are not posted publicly. If you have questions about specific journals, what our library is paying for subscriptions to them, and whether they have scholarship- and library-friendly policies, please ask the MSU librarian subject specialist for your area.