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The term serials crisis has become common shorthand for the runaway cost increases of many scholarly journals. The crisis is a result of the cost rising much faster than the rate of inflation, the number of such journals proliferating, and the funds available to the libraries is decreasing.

The cost of scientific journal is increasing faster than the inflation rate. There are many factors; Among them are:

• Each journal title is a unique commodity and cannot be replaced in a library collection by another less expensive journal on the same subject as one could with many other products.
• In general the cost of academic facilities and services increases faster than the inflation rate.
• As libraries cancel journal subscriptions, the cost for publishing them must be paid by the remaining subscribers.
• Many of the publishers of scientific journals are in Europe. As the United States dollar has weakened in relation to the currencies of Europe, the prices of journals to US libraries has increased disproportionately. When the United States dollar is strengthening, the prices of journals elsewhere increases disproportionately.
• The increasing domination of scholarly communication by commercial publishers, whose journals are more costly than those of academic societies.
• The increasing concentration of commercial publishing from the continuing merger of commercial publishers.

Due to:

• the publish or perish practices of academic institution, now increasingly found not only in universities, but in non-research colleges and junior colleges,
• the explosion in the number of academic subfields,
• the advance of research and higher education in other than the traditional countries,
• the increase in many countries of people with higher academic degrees
• the increasing complexity of technology

At the same time, libraries have seen collections budgets decline in real terms compared to the United States Periodical Price index. As well as other library expenditures such as computers and networking equipment.

To contain costs, while maintaining access to the latest scholarly research for their users, libraries are

• increasingly borrowing journals from one another (see interlibrary loan)
• purchasing single articles from commercial document suppliers (instead of subscribing to whole journals)
• canceling subscriptions to the least used or least cost-effective journals
• switching from printed to electronic copies of journals (except when the publisher charges more for the electronic edition)
• joining in co-operative consortial purchase arrangements for journals,
• engaging in collaborative ventures to bringing together a few titles and publishers to create lower-cost online journals with reasonable subscription terms,
• encouraging various schemes for obtaining free access to journals
• supporting journals that use other publishing models, such as
  • open access journals where the reader of a journal or the library at their institution does not need to pay a subscription or pay per view charge to read the articles published in that journal. This free access is achieved through a number of basic models. First, is the publication fee model in which a funding agency, university, or the author(s) of an article pay a publication fee per article to ensure that it will be available to readers free of charge. Sometimes these journals will waive the publication fee if the author cannot pay. Second, some open access journals receive institutional subsidies that make it unnecessary to charge publication fees.
  • hybrid open access journals (but only those that reduce subscription prices in proportion to author uptake)
  • delayed open access journals, provided that they strive to reduce the embargo period
• exploring other mechanisms for the publication of research.

Library and information science open access

• Open Access Overview Peter Suber
• The Post-Gutenberg Galaxy: How to Get There from Here Stevan Harnad
• Electronic Journals and Scholarly Communication: A Citation and Reference StudyStephen P. Harter and Hak Joon Kim
• Electronic Publishing in Science International Council of Scientific Unions/UNESCO
• New Horizons in Scholarly Communication Librarians Association of the University of California
• Tragic Loss or Good Riddance? The Impending Demise of Traditional Scholarly Journals Andrew M. Odlyzko
• The Library 'Doomsday Machine' Anne Okerson and Kendon Stubbs
• The Crisis in Scholarly Publishing University of Waterloo (Canada) Scholarly Societies Project
• Bridging the Gap Between Traditional and Electronic Scholarly Publishing Jerry Willis
• The Serials Crisis A White Paper for the UNC-Chapel Hill Scholarly Communications Convocation, Judith M. Panitch and Sarah Michalak, January, 2005
• U.S Periodical Prices -2005 American Library Association