ABSTRACT
Technological changes may have made OA possible for scholarly work, but the stage was set by a crisis of journal subscription rates during the 1980s and 1990s. As OA maven Peter Suber puts it (2004), during that period journal prices rose at a rate ‘four times faster than inflation for nearly two decades’. And the increase was not evenly distributed. The journal eco-system includes several types of publications. Some are put out independently, others by scholarly associations, and the majority – approximately 60% – by commercial publishers. The increasing subscription rates were mainly driven by this last group. In economics, for example, after adjusting for inflation, these profit-maximising commercial publishers raised rates by 300 per cent between 1985 and 2004. By comparison, non-profit journals in the field increased rates by 50 per cent (Bergstrom and Bergstrom 2004). At the upper extreme, Brain Research, published by Elsevier, costs a library well over $20,000 a year. This crisis hit university libraries hard, even well-funded ones. The leading North
American libraries, represented by the Association of Research Libraries, increased their journal spending by 260 per cent between 1986 and 2003 (Association of Research Libraries 2004). Eventually, though, libraries were forced to begin cutting subscriptions and scaling back their book purchases (Suber 2004). Given that the subscription crisis strained budgets at even the Harvards, Dukes, and MITs of the world, it should not be difficult to imagine its decimating effects on less well-endowed libraries in North America and especially in the developing world.1
