Do We Really Need More Journals?

By Nigel Thrift. In the middle of the recession, in the middle of a downturn in many library budgets, new academic journals keep popping up. I am not sure that this expansion is altogether a good thing. In part, this apparently remorseless expansion is an outcome of publisher “bundling” strategies which mean that, when combined with general technological advance, the costs of setting up a journal are much less than used to be the case. In part, it is an artifact of publishers’ Web publishing strategies which increasingly rely on multiplying stock so that electronic library shelves can come to resemble supermarket shelves from which it is possible to pick and mix. In part, it is an outcome of what sometimes seems like an increasingly narrow academic culture in which academics are part of self-selecting communities serviced by e-mail updates, mailing lists, keyword triggers, and the like, which mean that their searching is done for them and browsing is becoming an increasingly directed activity.
Whatever the exact cause and consequences, the fact is that new journals growing at a rate of some 3.26 percent per year (see the 2010 Chronicle article by Bauerlein et al).