The scholarly communication movement: highlights and recent developments

Purpose - To provide an overview of the growing international movement of librarians, faculty members, and researchers who are working together to develop new methods of scholarly communication, including Open Access (OA) journals, digital e-print archives, and institutional repositories, and to press for public access to federally funded research. Design/methodology/approach - Key elements which have created pressures for change in the scholarly communication system are reviewed: the development and expansion of the Internet and networked technologies, and rapidly increasing journal costs due to consolidation, pricing structures and title aggregating in the commercial journal publishing industry. Effects of these pressures on libraries, citing Bowdoin College as an illustrative case, and examples of OA and affordably priced journal publishing models and OA principles and infrastructure are presented. Findings - The OA movement has gained momentum and appears to be meeting with some success, with worldwide efforts to make federally funded research available to taxpayers and the largest science, technology and medicine journal publishers revisiting pricing structures. It is predicted that commercial journals, OA journals and digital repositories will continue to co-exist as information resources for the scholarly community for the foreseeable future. Research limitations/implications - This is not an exhaustive history, but rather a review of movement highlights, written by a steering committee member of SPARC, a major scholarly communication movement stakeholder. Originality/value - A useful overview for librarians and researchers unfamiliar with the movement who wish to educate local faculty members about the implications for their publishing and professional activities, as well as for commercial publishers and scholarly presses interested in learning more about the movement.