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 Technological issues

3.12. The digital revolution in publishing. We have now reached a position where the current contents—and in most cases the back-runs—of nearly all journal titles are available online. This has brought a key shift in the relationship between libraries and publishers. Where libraries formerly purchased physical copies of journals, they now purchase licences under the terms of which publishers provide access to content that is held on their platforms.

3.13. This shift has been accompanied by a huge increase in the number of journal titles made available through university libraries. That has been the result of so-called big deals under which publishers sell licensed access to a broad range (sometimes all) of their journal titles for a fixed period of three years or more. The pricing of such deals is complex: for while the price of individual titles is discounted deeply, publishers are in effect expanding their market by shifting libraries from highly-selective to larger all-encompassing collections. Taken together, the internet and the rise of big deals have brought a fundamental shift in research communications, particularly in relation to journals.

3.14. The changes have been welcomed by researchers across all disciplines. For in their capacities both as producers and as consumers of research outputs, researchers see articles in journals as the dominant channel for communicating the results of research; and that dominance has been enhanced in the last decade. Numerous surveys have shown how researchers have welcomed and embraced easy 24/7 access to unprecedented amounts of content. Tenopir and King’s studies of researchers in the US indicate that the number of articles read each month by university faculty has increased by over 80 per cent since the late 1970s.

3.15. The form in which articles are read has not changed as much as some would wish. Most papers are downloaded in the PDF format that mimics the form of the printed page; and a high proportion are printed for reading offline. Nearly all content is produced and also made available, however, in XML and HTML format; and there are increasing moves towards the use of more sophisticated semantic mark-up with more extensive linking and interactive features that cannot be accommodated in PDFs. Publishers are also addressing the demands for making their content