The traditional mission of libraries has been to collect, preserve, organize and provide access to scholarly and cultural information, including scholarly literature in academic journals. Depending on each library's budget and user group, this part of the mission was carried out either by housing on-site bound print runs of journals or by obtaining a reproduction of what was needed from other institutions (Interlibrary Loan). Faculty and students in the past were confident that they could find in our "brick and mortar" facilities what they needed in order to conduct their research.
In the past ten years, new publishing technology -- journal content delivered to subscribers in electronic format -- and new ownership paradigms -- increasing corporate ownership of journal titles -- have led to what some call "the crisis in scholarly communication".
Key elements of this issue are:
Archiving and Preserving of Digital Content No reliable model has been developed to permanently archive digital scholarly output.
Copyright Management Authors usually transfer copyright to the journal publisher, thus limiting access to their work to persons with individual subscriptions or to libraries with subscriptions.
Journal Prices Costs of journal subscriptions have risen at a far greater pace than inflation, and library budgets have not kept up: the Consumer Price Index (CPI) increased 73% between 1986-2004, but research library expenditures for serials increased 273%. In addition, journal publishers are increasingly "bundling" electronic journals into big-ticket purchases, making it difficult for smaller or less wealthy institutions to gain access. See Journal Prices & Library Budgets from Association of Research Libraries (ARL) for more.
New Models of Publishing:
Open Access: publishing model whereby the the author (or the author's grant-making body / institution pays a fee to publish in peer-reviewed journals that are freely-accessible to all scholars.
Institutional Repositories: a digital archive maintained by institutions whereby faculty and researchers can deposit digital copies of print publications, media, and data. The institutions remain responsible for preservation and access. Access for each work can be limited to authorized users.