According to David Thornburg, Educational Futurist, the amount of information available in the world doubles every two years. Librarians, who collect, organize, archive, and facilitate access to information, are more interested in quality rather than quantity. An overabundance of information does not assure information literacy-the ability to identify an information need, to locate, evaluate, use and communicate information in response to that need. What's more, information has also increased exponentially in price. As an academic librarian involved in the process of scholarly communication, I have a vested interest in the pricing practices of academic journal publishers.

Scholarly communication includes the participation of faculty, publishers, libraries, and readers. Professors, chief producers of scholarship, believe in the free-flow of information; while commercial publishers, aggregators and conduits of information, profit from assembling, packaging and distributing information. Such contrasting values and expectations have left librarians, who seek open and cost-effective scholarly publications, at the mercy of publishers' increasing journal price subscriptions (print and electronic).

Case in point, according to a study conducted by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), between 1986 and 1998:

• unit cost of scholarly journals increased 175 percent
• libraries spent 152 percent more and acquired 7 percent fewer journals
• journal prices increased approximately 10 percent per year during this period

This continuing trend, characterized by greater commercial control over the scholarly communication process, I believe, is redefining librarians' roles and situating the library and information profession at the center of the scholarly communication process. Consider the following developments:

• Libraries serving as scholarly communication builders. The library as publisher has only existed in the model of HighWire Press (Stanford University) where the library has provided the means of electronic publication.
• Libraries looking outside the profession and outside the United States in an effort to build global library consortiums.
• Libraries participating in the ongoing dialog regarding the establishment of a national information policy.
• Libraries building and sharing institutional digital repositories.
• Libraries leading digital publishing enterprises, which include learned societies, consortia, computing centers, university presses, and commercial publishers.

When publishers' pricing practices alter the scholarly communication process, librarians have an opportunity to forge new roles as advocates, coalition-builders, and educators for the benefit of their most important constituents: students, faculty, and staff.

Pedro Reynoso
Honnold/Mudd
pedro.reynoso@libraries.claremont.edu