This guide accompanies the "Responsible Authorship" SARI (Scholarship and Research Integrity) session for the Department of Art History.  It lists most of the topics covered in that session and provides links to the sources used in the session and to additional sources of information.

A handful of trends in the commercial aspects of academic publishing have placed stresses on scholarship that seem unsustainable and are arguably unjust.  These include (but are not limited to):

• An increasing portion of published scholarship that is controlled by a small number of commercial publishers.  For example, data for journals show how six publishers control an increasing percentage of academic journal articles: 
  • Larivière, Vincent, Stefanie Haustein, and Philippe Mongeon. “The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era.” PLOS One 10, no. 6 (June 10, 2015): e0127502.

     
• Cost increases in academic journal publishing have been well-above other inflationary measures for decades.  
  • Fei Shu et al., “Is It Such a Big Deal? On the Cost of Journal Use in the Digital Era." College & Research Libraries, 79, no. 6 (Sept., 2018): 785-98.


• Due to the factors above, and the practice that the larger companies have of "packaging" their products so that individual titles may not be selected by libraries, an increasing amount of academic library expenditures is consumed by the costs of subscriptions for journals and databases:
  • Kyrillidou, Martha. “Inflation-Adjusted ARL Library Expenditures Data Available from University of Connecticut,” Association of Research Libraries (blog), accessed January 19, 2020.


• A similar phenomenon has led to dramatic increases in the costs incurred by students for textbooks. 
  • Gaby Del Valle, “The High Cost of College Textbooks, Explained,” Vox, March 6, 2019, accessed January 19, 2020.