RLI 287  9 RESEARCH LIBRARY ISSUES: A REPORT FROM ARL, CNI, AND SPARC 2015 scholarly communication, but since the 1990s budget cuts for the NEA and NEH (public funding) have led to Mellon (private funding) coming to overshadow the rest. Mellon’s commitment and resources help set much of the direction for current experiments and projects using the Internet and digitization to better promote scholarly communication. Reactions to the Serials Crisis Responses to the rising cost of supporting journal subscriptions included the collective response of library consortia, strengthening interlibrary loan, digitizing back issues, creating digital or e-journals, open access and public access publication, and experiments with alternative short-form formats. Library consortia are not new, but in recent years they have become increasingly involved in the purchase and licensing of electronic resources including databases and bundled journal subscriptions, first introduced in 1996 with Academic Press’s “Big Deal.” However, 15 years after these bundling options were introduced they were no longer as effective as they had been in increasing the ability of individual libraries to access resources, as members of consortia or individually. As Richard Poynder points out, the bundled option only worked for a short while as the large line-item purchasing limited the flexibility of library directors to apply their budgets and resources more selectively. By 2011 it was apparent that bundling had failed to curb costs—the cost of the bundled deals had risen from 50% of a library’s purchasing budget to around 65%.11 Poynder describes the response, “as publishers’ journal portfolios got larger and larger as a result of industry consolidation, the Big Deals began to devour an ever larger portion of a library’s budget.”12 Regardless, faculty continue to clamor for access but have only slowly started to embrace alternative publishing options such as OA journals or the voluntary deposit of even their pre-press publications in institutional repositories. Innovations in Digital Journal Publishing In the 1980s librarian-futurists such as Martin Cummings and David Lewis believed that electronic publication of all journals and books was the future of a near-universal scholarly communication system. Cummings argues that electronic publishing would be used because of the advantages it would offer: “(1) more than one person can access and use the information simultaneously (2) it is always available (e.g., never at the bindery, misplaced, or lost) and (3) it can be expected to be more durable than information on paper.”13 Cummings had expected electronic publications to be stored on optical or compact disks, but as with the experiments in putting magazines and journals on floppy disks, these media proved ephemeral. Donald Waters points out that by 2005 peer-reviewed scholarly journals were migrating “from print to electronic publication…at a particularly rapid pace” and that a growing number of “editors are treating the electronic versions of journals as the definitive versions of record.”14 Migrations to electronic journal or e-journal format helped make scholarship more accessible, searchable, and citable, but the exponential Responses to the rising cost of supporting journal subscriptions included the collective response of library consortia, strengthening interlibrary loan, digitizing back issues, creating digital or e-journals, open access and public access publication, and experiments with alternative short-form formats.