4.0 Introduction

The term serials crisis is commonly used to highlight the exponential increase in subscription cost of many scholarly journals, particularly, which are published by for-profit publishers. This crisis in academic publishing is "widely perceived", which is to do with the combined pressure of budget cuts at universities, increased costs of journals, unbearable economic recession and the global economic downturns in recent times. In many countries the funds available to the libraries for journals subscription have remained static or have declined in real terms. On the other hand, journals subscription prices for institutional access have been rising much faster than the Consumer Price Index for several decades. This causes the declining subscriptions to number of journal titles to accommodate price increase of the core essential journals to institutional research activities.The serials crisis phenomenon led to initiation of global open access movement to help the researchers to come out of over-dependency on monopolistic corporate publishing companies. On the other hand, many open access journal publishers charge article processing fee or publishing fee from the submitting authors, as one of the major sources of revenue to self-sustain an open access journal publishing venture. No-fee open access journals are also in existence, which get cross-subsidy from the public exchequers or collective supports from scholarly societies’ membership. Open access journals are nowadays getting attentions from predatory publishers as well. For every three ‘recorded’ open access journals, there is every possibility of having a ‘predatory’ open access journal. Usually, existence of open access journals is recorded in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) which shows availability of about 9804 open access journals as on 15th January 2014. In this Module, various reasons and solutions to mitigate serials crisis are discussed in details to help the researchers in understanding present day problems associated with the scholarly publishing, especially the journals.

Last modified: Thursday, 25 March 2021, 11:06 AM