The Ever-Present Library Doomsday Machine: The Story of the Ongoing Serial Crisis and the Quest for Open Access to Stop It

The Rise of the Doomsday Machine

Often, a crisis does not appear unexpectedly, but festers and emerges after years and years of slow and graduate growth. For example, in the early 1990s, the Gulf War had just ended, Terminator 2: Judgement Day redefined the horrors of future technology, and Publishers Weekly released an article titled The library “doomsday machine.” In the article, authors Ann Okerson and Kendon Stubbs express concern about rapid rise of scholarly journal prices, which were increasing at an alarming rate. For example, "Computers and Structures (Pergamon) rose from $1140 in 1986 to $2384 in 1989 — an increase of 109%” while the "Journal of Economics (Springer-Verlag) rose from $100 to $263, or 163% in three years. Art History (Basil Blackwell) rose from $52 to $96 (85%).” The general cost of most serials only continued to rise in 1991. These price increases were far surpassing inflation at the time, and librarians could no longer purchase every academic journal. Instead, librarians were canceling subscriptions en masse, with some larger institutions dropping thousands of titles. Still, this did not abate the problem, as prices for academic journals would continue to increase — putting continuous financial strain on academic libraries. As Okerson and Stubbs (1991) concluded in their article, “Until some of these solutions and strategies begin to take effect, the buying picture for library materials — and thus for their publishers — looks dismal.” This crisis is still prevalent today with libraries, and in many cases, looks as dismal as it did in 1991.

The Library “Doomsday Machine,” more often called The Serial Crisis, is a crisis that has been in the making for decades. While the price increase of academic journals began in the 1980s, the financial strain was really beginning to be felt by the 1990s and continued throughout the decade. Cancellations were rampant with “estimates of anticipated journal cancellations [rising] from a combined $3 million in 1990, to $6 million in 1991, and then swell[ing] to $12 million in 1992” (McCarthy, 1994). In 1998, the University of California — after undergoing five serial cancellations in ten years — relied on faxing articles amongst their library networks in order to save money (Duda, 1998). Despite these efforts, the Serial Crisis continued to be a thorn to libraries, particularly larger institutions.

Why did prices continue to rise?  To find out, please read the rest of the article on Medium.