Section II:
Growth in the Size of the Collections

"Librarians are slashing their serials and book buying just to meet the sharply rising cost of scholarly journals in fields like science, technology, medicine, law and economics. The average price of a subscription to a scholarly journal has more than tripled in the last 214 years. To keep up, libraries now buy fewer new books than they did a decade ago, diminishing the market for books of all kinds and frustrating professors desperate to publish. ... 10 years ago, publishers expected to sell libraries about 2,500 copies of a serious or literary book, about half of what a small publisher needs to break even and nearly enough for a university press. [They] are counting on selling libraries more like 1,000 or 1,500." David D. Kirkpatrick, "As Publishers Perish, Libraries Feel the Pain," New York Times, November 3, 2000

"How would you feel about a restaurant that makes you bring your own food and cook it yourself, then presents you with an outrageous check and a cover charge? That's how [one] ... professor describes some of the world's leading academic journals. To be published in these journals, academics pay commercial publishers when they submit papers that other academics have refereed and edited free of charge ... but the same professors' libraries then pay richly for the finished product many months later." Charles Goldsmith, "Publish or Perish, But at What Cost to Academia?" The Wall Street Journal, January 8, 2001