Toward a Potential Solution of the Crisis in Scholarly Publishing: An Academic Research Community Alliance Model

Abstract

The authors assess the current status of scholarly publishing and reach the conclusion that the current situation is both in a state of flux and not sustainable. While such an assessment is becoming increasingly well understood, a solution to the problems seemingly does not exist. What even embodies an improvement to the current state of scholarly publishing depends on one’s perspective. The authors approach the problem from the perspective of the main producers and consumers of scholarly knowledge—academic and governmental research institutions. From this perspective, they define a set of objectives for scholarly publishing and dissemination of published works, and they assess the challenges with current approaches to meeting these objectives for commercial publishers, professional organization publishers, and academic press publishers. Based on this analysis, the authors propose a new model for academic publishing that might help achieve the stated objectives. The academic research community alliance model suggested is based on the scholarly community taking on the responsibilities of peer review, article production, and knowledge dissemination while acting in an altruistic way of doing so. The proposed approach is described in detail, and both challenges and potential solutions to the impediments to implementing this model are explored. Finally, the authors report on initial efforts to build support for the proposed model, which suggests that meaningful progress on this difficult problem is possible.