Hand Wringing in Paradise: Scholarly Communication and the Intimate Twinges of Conscience

ABSTRACT Scholarly communication today is in the midst of a healthy and long running crisis that has been good for libraries, good for scholars and good for publishers. It is a reflection of a hypercompetitive academic environment and a ruthless academic winnowing and reward system. Large commercial publishers have successfully manipulated this system with the complicity of library consortia, which has led in turn to the birth of the expensive and at times counter-productive open access movement that later reached its nadir with the problematic SCOAP (Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics) episode. In our obsession with navel gazing we have forgotten the decisive role that China will play in future developments in scholarly communication. This article originally published in Journal of Library Administration, Vol. 51, Issues 5?6, pages 415?431, 2011. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01930826.2011.589335.