Scholarly publishing has been a narrative involving crisis, lack of funding, academic egos, and self-preservation. As part of that story, there are victims, villains, and heroes. The Scholarly Kitchen brought us this interesting news in their article, “Library Expenditures, Salaries Outstrip Inflation.”
This doesn’t completely capture the complexity of the scholarly publishing market. Each year, libraries receive a smaller slice of their institutions’ pies.
The author of this article has taken time to break down the analytics of support and costs for Association of Research Libraries (ARL) libraries using the Library Investment Index and other tools. This gets deep and is worth the read.
The problems affecting libraries and professors are the same problems affecting many other institutions that depend upon highly trained professionals — they cost a lot to recruit, train, and retain. It is much more difficult to talk about systemic problems in an organization than just to list off the faults and point fingers.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.
