What can individual scholars do about the problem?
Examine the pricing, licensing, and copyright issues of any journal that you contribute to or edit.
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Refuse to submit papers to, review papers for, or be on editorial boards for unreasonably expensive journals, and choose journals with reasonable pricing practices. What are reasonably priced journals? See here.
- If you are an editor of a journal, investigate its cost and policies to determine if they are library-and scholarship-friendly and consider moving your journal to a non-profit publisher if it is currently with a for-profit publisher.
- Encourage your scholarly associations to explore alternatives to contracting or selling publications to commercial publishers.
- Encourage your scholarly association to maintain reasonable prices and copyright terms for their published products.
Learn about new publishing models and open-access journals and consider publishing with this alternative.
Discuss departmental promotion and tenure expectations to see if they can be modified to reward quality scholarship published in alternative journals and discourage publishing with unreasonably priced journals.
See if you can modify any contracts you sign with publishers to ensure your right to use your work as you see fit, including posting it to a public archive (see copyright issues).
Support the MSU Libraries' cancellation of high-cost, low-use journals and encourage discussion of scholarly communication issues at MSU.
MSU Faculty members: Are you involved in any way in projects which
seek to address these problems? Or do you want to discuss these issues
further? Please let know :Susan
Kendall