Declaring Independence at Penn Penn Library homepage We will find a way or we wil make one. Scholarly Communication at Penn * Independence Home Keep what belongs to you: Author's rights & copyright Penn's copyright policy Engage the publishers: What you can do Track our progress: Academic, national, & international intiatives NIH Public Access Policy & NIH-funded research Resources for Librarians Penn Affiliations & Discounts Check your discounts SPARC PLoS LOCKSS (Digital preservation) The Penn Initiative ScholarlyCommons@Penn Feedback Headlines Open letter to all university presidents and provosts concerning increasingly expensive journals (pdf) Charts & Graphs The price tag Sticker Shock Journal price increases by discipline comparative data The 7-year trend: Information expenditures by format Measurements of inflation in higher education An Alternative to the Print Journal Middleman; New models for Scholarly Communication Most of the content of scientific journals is created by academics, reviewed by academics, and read by academics. The print journal middleman adds decreasing value to the process as information technology reduces the mechanical overheads of reviewing, editing, and distribution. University libraries are in the business of archiving the most important scholarly materials and making them available to a broad community. By diverting some of what they pay middlemen to supporting repositories and e-journals, they could increase the flow of scholarly communication without increasing costs. That is, they can increase their productivity and address better the needs of their customers, and indeed the needs of an increasingly connected global community that can benefit from and contribute to scholarly communication. Creating and sustaining more open scholarly communication channels requires new approaches to scholarly work and its validation, new information science and technology, new intellectual property models, and new funding models. Penn can make important contributions to this interdisciplinary endeavor. I hope that you will explore the Winning Independence site and begin discussing the issues of copyright and reforming the scholarly communication process with your colleagues. - Fernando Pereira Andrew and Debra Rachleff Professor Chair, Computer and Information Science