The Faustian grip of academic publishing

The journal acquisition budget of libraries is not increasing at the same rate as subscription rates, creating the serials crisis. Many solutions have been proposed including the freely available electronic journal. However, all the solutions suffer the same Faustian grip--namely that the actors in the academic publishing game have little or no incentive to stop publishing in the current journals. We examine those incentives concluding that even with a better, more efficient technology, the actors will not change from the current academic publishing institution, and the serials crisis will remain.