 Information Economics, brought to you by CSUSB's John M. Fowl Library. In this video, we'll peek behind the scenes at the economic nature of scholarly information. You'll find that academic publishing models play a very important role in how information is disseminated and which resources you can access. Let's start at the very beginning of what is sometimes referred to as scholarly communication or the system in which information is created, evaluated, disseminated and preserved. It all starts when someone creates a book, chapter or article based on his or her research. This someone, say your professor, not only does this to add to existing disciplinary knowledge but also because if they are employed at a university, they likely have to. You might have heard the phrase, publish or perish, which illustrates that creating knowledge, often referred to as publishing, is something that is typically required for tenure and promotion. Your professor's areas of expertise, available funding and disciplinary trends influence what is researched and published. At this point, let's say your professor wrote up her research findings in an article. Articles are typically published in journals or magazines and since your professor is expected to produce scholarly information, she will likely submit it to a peer-reviewed journal. This is a very important step as the journal that she chooses to publish her work in will determine how it will be viewed by her peers. If, for example, her article is published in the top peer-reviewed journal in her field, others will expect that it is of high quality and they will be more likely to cite it in their own work. Publication quality and the amount of attention her work gets matters quite a bit if she wants to be considered an expert in her field. When your professor agrees to publish her article in a specific journal, this is when she engages in what is called rights management. What this means is that often, the publisher of the journal will assume copyright of your professor's work. Even though she created it, it now belongs to the publisher and it is essentially theirs to sell to others. When the publisher makes articles available for purchase, they are selling access to information, just like when a magazine sells you a subscription to what they publish. This is where the library comes in. Because libraries purchase access for more than one person, including students, faculty, and staff, they spend large amounts of money to get the content you need for academic research. The library will choose to either purchase a subscription to an individual journal, to a package of journals owned by the same publisher, or to a database that contains many different journal articles. If you think about it, the library, a representative of the campus, is in the position of having to purchase research that was created by professors on the same campus. As you might have guessed, there are a lot of people who are fighting against these types of publishing models, and open access publications and institutional repositories play an important role in providing alternatives. The exciting thing is that change is in the air. Self-publishing, the participatory web, social media, altmetrics, open access, all of this is shaking up traditional models of scholarly communication. We've certainly got a lot to look forward to.