What the experts and stakeholders say:

The Crisis is Economic; The Conflict is Profitability Versus Readership

• Journal subscription prices have increased by 227% between 1986 and 2002; CPI increased 51%.
• State and university budgets can no longer absorb these increases.
• Research requires access to the complete domain of information.
• The public expects access to publicly funded research results.
• Publishers need to cover their costs and keep up with technological advances.

The controversy is over the price of scholarly journals, the barriers to access created by the ever-increasing prices and the extent to which scholarly information should be more-or-less freely available as a public good.