Thanks Barbara Fister for Occupy Knowledge and John Dupuis for The power of blogs, or #OccupyScholComm who helped inspire this post.

Let’s talk money.

The current inflation rate is 3.87%.

Academic library budgets are flat, or worse.

But at my college library, SAGE is charging us about a 9% increase over what we paid last year. I believe we are locked in to 5% increases for the next two years.

The American Chemical Society is charging a 7.4% increase.

SAGE is a commercial publisher, aiming to maximize its bottom line, though I think it is in danger of killing the golden goose.

The ACS is a nonprofit organization, chartered by Congress. The ACS also accredits college chemistry departments, and one of the conditions of accreditation is subscribing to top chemistry journals, many of which (surprise!) are published by the ACS. So that’s either a conflict of interest or a protection racket, depending on how generous you are feeling. “That’s a nice little chemistry department you have there, library. It’s be a shame if anything were to happen to it.”

SAGE and the ACS both publish high-quality academic journals, some of which are vital to our faculty and students’ work. And it’s true, like so many other libraries, we have accepted these terms, so one could argue that we have only ourselves to blame.

If we have only ourselves to blame, then it stands to reason that only we can fix this.

Like the protestors of Occupy Wall Street, I don’t have clear demands. I don’t have a clear solution. But, like those protestors I can also tell when the many are getting screwed to benefit the few.

#OccupyScholComm