Competition and cooperation: Libraries and publishers in the transition to electronic scholarly journals

摘要

The conversion of scholarly journals to digital format is proceeding rapidly,especially for those from large commercial and learned society publishers. Thisconversion offers the best hope for survival for such publishers. The infamous"journal crisis" is more of a library cost crisis than a publisher pricingproblem, with internal library costs much higher than the amount spent onpurchasing books and journals. Therefore publishers may be able to retain oreven increase their revenues and profits, while at the same time providing asuperior service. To do this, they will have to take over many of the functionof libraries, and they can do that only in the digital domain. This paperexamines publishers' strategies, how they are likely to evolve, and how theywill affect libraries.