RLI 287  3 RESEARCH LIBRARY ISSUES: A REPORT FROM ARL, CNI, AND SPARC 2015 economy rather than that of a strictly commercial market. Much of the labor surrounding scholarly publications, writing, editing, and peer review, was and is essentially exchanged for reputation and prestige, factors that became and remain important in the assessment, promotion, and tenure process of modern higher education.1 The system of scholarly communication continued to grow and evolve beyond the journal as the landscape of higher education changed. The passage of the Morrill Act in 1862 brought about the creation of the land-grant university system and shifted the focus of higher education in the US toward research and improving the economy. More than just increasing the number of students and faculty, the range of scholarly disciplines expanded as did large-scale research projects that necessitated a new long-form of scholarly communication: the scholarly monograph, a specialist work on a single subject by a single author, a format that has since become inextricably linked with the system of assessment, promotion, and tenure for those in the humanities and social sciences. The 1887 Hatch Act placed greater emphasis (and access to funding) on experimentation and the 1914 Smith-Lever Act on sharing knowledge and information with the public, suggesting a greater emphasis on publication by professional scholars.2 The monograph was intended to meet this need, rather than provide a source of revenue or even cost recovery, so it fell to universities to augment the efforts of the scholarly societies by also becoming publishers. The economics of the monograph meant that these new university presses also came to depend on the same prestige economy that already supported journal production. Surprisingly, journals and monographs became profitable in the second-half of the 20th century after the GI Bill and the “space race” fueled a greater expansion of higher education and the rapid conversion of teachers’ colleges into universities. Publishing had to expand to meet the burgeoning needs of a growing faculty and body of scholarship, along with increased interest in new science and technology, leading libraries to purchase more works, and then to physically grow as they required more storage space. This activity was largely funded by government grants and programs in the post-war decades, especially in the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), yet society and university presses could not keep up with the demand, attracting commercial publishers to the now lucrative academic market, creating what some have called the golden age of academic publishing. However, because most of this production was supported by public funds rather than the scholarly market (student use, library holdings, or for use in promotion and tenure review),3 when federal and state budgets were eventually cut in the 1970s, sales faltered and scholarly publishing began to suffer. The changing roles and mission of libraries and the spreading influence of digital technology began to radically alter scholarly communications in the 1980s. While libraries tried to maintain the strengths of their collections, and preservation efforts and bibliographic control, they also moved to automate processes as computer and information technology developed. Library experts such as Martin Cummings and David Lewis considered the costs of automation and the changing nature of the library, its holdings, and services, with Cummings addressing automation and cataloging, and Lewis forecasting not only the way research might change, but also how scholars and students might use the library differently (if at all).4 Cummings added to the voices of others in pointing out that the cost of publications had risen faster than the consumer price index since the late 1970s and libraries had started to develop “resource-sharing