Competition and cooperation: Libraries and publishers in the transition toelectronic scholarly journals

The conversion of scholarly journals to digital format is proceeding rapidl y, especially those of large commercial and learned society publishers. Thi s conversion offers the best hope for survival for such publishers. The inf amous 'journal crisis' is more of a library cost crisis than a publisher pr icing problem, with internal library costs much higher than the amount spen t on purchasing books and journals. Therefore publishers may be able to ret ain or even increase their revenues and profits while providing superior se rvice. To do this, they will have to take over many of the functions of lib raries, and they can do that only in the digital domain. This paper examine s publishers' strategies, how they are likely to evolve, and how they will affect libraries.