As is detailed more thoroughly in Chapter 2, the economics of
scholarly publishing are complex. For instance, it is worth considering whether true markets can exist in journal subscriptions or book
sales to academic institutions and whether the profit motive stands in
fundamental opposition to the goal of academic research. After all,
because academic work must be original, there should be no comparable ‘competition’ to an article or book when a researcher needs
it, a fact that makes it difficult to construe conventional economic
markets.30 When a particular article or book is necessary, nothing
else will do and the researcher must acquire access to it. From this
fact, in every instance the publisher has a ‘mini-monopoly’ on an
article or book, as Peter Suber frames it,31 an aspect made possible
because, unlike many other commodities, books and journal articles
‘differ in that they are not substitutes for each other’.32
Regardless of this, the demand-side system of subscriptions and sales was working relatively well until the late 1980s when a sudden mass expansion of higher education in the Anglophone academy (and elsewhere) triggered changes to the supply side of the ecosystem.33 Combined with a growing credentialism in academia that focused on research output, the demand to be able to publish research in often niche areas overtook and outstripped the desire necessarily to read that same research.34 This led to fierce competition to publish in prestigious journals or with respected publishers as they began to act as proxy measures for hiring committees, eventually replicating the scarcity in the job market and the high number of applicants for each post.
This is to say that, as much as there is a library budget crisis in being able to afford access to all research, there is also a supply-side crisis for all researchers to be able to publish their work; an aspect that becomes ever more crucial to holding a secure academic post.35 This logic sounds callous when put in relation to academic research: humanities academics are, after all, most frequently used to viewing their niche work as holding esoteric, rather than popular or even utilitarian, value. It feels grimly utilitarian to specify that problems in library budgets could be driven by the presence of too much interesting work that should be published, but this is one way of viewing the problem.36 To think firstly in terms of journals, as more researchers produce material in the ever more competitive quest for jobs, the
