Association of Research Libraries

Over the past two decades, mergers in the publishing industry have been accompanied by significant escalation in the price of serial publications, eroding libraries' ability to provide users with the publications they need. Another area of concern is the way new publishing practices may have anticompetitive effects. ARL, a partner in the Information Access Alliance (IAA), is working to encourage state and federal antitrust enforcement agencies to adopt a new standard of antitrust review for publisher mergers and to examine anticompetitive practices in scholarly publishing.

• "Issue Brief: John Wiley and Sons' Acquisition of Blackwell Publishing," [PDF] ARL, February 2007

• “The State of the Large Publisher Bundle: Findings from an ARL Member Survey,” Karla Hahn, ARL Bimonthly Report, April 2006.

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

• "Publisher Mergers: A Consumer-Based Approach to Antitrust Analysis" [PDF], Thomas M. Susman, David J. Carter, and the Information Access Alliance, June 2003

• "The Academic Publishing Industry: A Story of Merger and Acquisition", Mary H. Munroe, last updated 2007