Libraries face higher costs for academic journals

Growing numbers of university librarians are reporting difficulties in continuing agreements to pay for increasingly expensive academic journals that their budgets can no longer afford.

Academic librarians and publishers attending the annual meeting of the UK Serials Group (a professional interest group on scholarly communication) last week said that the organisation and funding of research publications would have to change.

“The budgets of academic libraries have not kept pace with the increasing number and price of journals their users want to use,” said Dr Fytton Rowland, senior lecturer in information science at Loughborough University.

The underlying problem is that journals are monopolies, argued Mr …