COPYCENSE

"Libraries conduct business with numerous companies to acquire scholarly resources for their user communities. Over the last 10 to 15 years, however, many of these companies have been bought and sold, resulting in fewer and fewer publishers in the commercial marketplace.

"Within scholarly publishing, librarians have watched the number of companies shrink while prices rise and service declines. Individually, library associations in the United States have conveyed their concerns about major mergers to the Department of Justice. These included the 1991 purchase of Pergamon Press by Elsevier Science, the Thomson-West merger of 1996, the proposed merger of Reed Elsevier and Wolters Kluwer in 1997, and the purchase by Reed Elsevier of Harcourt General in 2001.

"The Association of College & Research Libraries, recognizing that it was time for a new strategy in confronting mergers, invited colleagues from several other library organizations to discuss how to pool efforts on a more public-policy focused effort to bring attention to this issue. Out of these discussions in spring 2002, the Information Access Alliance was born.

Mary M. Case. Information Access Alliance: Challenging Anticompetitive Behavior in Academic Publishing. C&RL News. June 2004.