Journal Inflation: Further Reading

“Promotion of research and related publications is now a team effort. Yet many authors are unaware they must take increasingly active roles.... [L]ibraries are the natural spaces for support and promotion of research.”

Tulley, C. Making the most of your research promotion team. Inside Higher Ed, 28 June 2019, https://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2019/06/28/how-work-publishers-universities-and-libraries-promote-your-research-and-related

“[C]ritics of journal impact factors point out that where a paper is published is not necessarily an accurate reflection of its quality...”

Mayo, N. University vows not to consider journal quality, but does. Inside Higher Ed, 28 June 2019, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/06/28/university-vowed-not-consider-journal-quality-hiring-does-just

Origins

“[T]he Big Deal is an online aggregation of journals that publishers offer as a one-price, one size fits all package. In the Big Deal, libraries agree to buy electronic access to all of a commercial publisher's journals for a price based on current payments to that publisher, plus some increment. Under the terms of the contract, annual price increases are capped for a number of years.

“... the content is, henceforth, "bundled" so that individual journal subscriptions can no longer be cancelled in their electronic format.

“There's no question that the Big Deal offers desirable short-term benefits, including expanded information access for the library's licensed users. In the longer run, these contracts will weaken the power of librarians and consumers to influence scholarly communication systems in the future.... Those who follow us will face the all-or-nothing choice of paying whatever publishers want or giving up an indispensable resource.”

Frazier, K. The librarians’ dilemma: Contemplating the costs of the “Big Deal.” D-Lib Magazine, 7(3): 2001. http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march01/frazier/03frazier.html

Present Impacts

“[W]hile big deal bundles do decrease the mean price per subscribed journal, academic libraries receive less value for their investment. We find that university researchers cite only a fraction of journals purchased by their libraries, that this fraction is decreasing, and that the cost per cited journal has increased.”

Shu, F., et al. Is it such a big deal? On the cost of journal use in the digital era. College & Research Libraries, 79(6): 2018. doi:10.5860/crl.79.6.785. 

“The proportion of the scientific output published in journals under their ownership has risen steadily over the past 40 years, and even more so since the advent of the digital era. The value added, however, has not followed a similar trend.”

Larivière, Vincent, Stefanie Haustein, and Philippe Mongeon. "The oligopoly of academic publishers in the digital era." PloS one 10.6: (2015).
doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0127502. 

Likely Future

“This SPARC Landscape Analysis was commissioned in response to the growing trend of commercial acquisition of critical infrastructure in our institutions. It is intended to provide a comprehensive look at the current players in this arena, their strategies and potential actions, and the implications of these on the operations of our libraries and home institutions. It also outlines suggestions for an initial set of strategic responses for the community to consider building out in order to ensure community control of both this infrastructure and the data generated by/resident on it.”

Aspesi, Claudio, et al. "SPARC* Landscape Analysis: The Changing Academic Publishing Industry–Implications for Academic Institutions." (2019). https://sparcopen.org/our-work/landscape-analysis/ 

“Despite the superficial benefits of the rising uptake of certain open access practices by big publishers, it is clear that they are developing alternative methods of entrenching dependency by institutions and individual researchers. This integration has the further potential to exert a direct exclusionary effect on less financially well-endowed journals and institutions, primarily those in the Global South, in their compulsion to adopt the western modality of knowledge production. To ensure the global resolutions of inequalities in discourse and scholarly representation there is thus a clear need for a community-driven integration of scholarly infrastructure, one that is aware of the potential of inequality preparation within the community rather than one which only seeks to add value and co-opt the process for the objective of rent.”

Posada, Alejandro, and George Chen. "Inequality in knowledge production: The integration of academic infrastructure by big publishers." 2018. doi.org/10.4000/proceedings.elpub.2018.30