It has been a slow but steady move to make scholarship freely available Most of us spend a few hundred rupees a year on the magazines we buy for leisure reading or for keeping abreast of current affairs. But if you are a scientist, you may be shelling out a few thousand rupees for the journal your professional society publishes for its members. Of course, if you are a serious researcher, you may have to read or refer to many journals, not two or three. And you will depend on your institution’s library for those journals. Till 20-30 years ago, most academic libraries, at least in the West, did not find it difficult to subscribe to most journals needed by the scientists in their institutions. Then things started changing and journal subscription prices started skyrocketing — some costing $20,000-40,000 — leading to what librarians call the serials crisis. Much of the price rise was caused by commercial publishers, such as Elsevier, Springer and Wiley. These three control most of t...
Learning and Information Resource Centre of SFIT...