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U.S. academic libraries have substantial resources to commit to advance the research and teaching and learning agendas of their institutions. In the aggregate, academic libraries annually have $2,000,000,000 in purchasing power for materials. However, the disproportionate increases in the costs of scholarly information continue to erode the ability of libraries to meet the information needs of their users. If academic libraries consolidated their purchasing power and pooled their resources, the results for higher education could be transformational. Effectively, a universal digital academic library could be established to serve higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to the journal is presented in which two of the editors discuss topics having to do with scholarly communication, including open access publishing, scholarly publishing, and the history of the academic press.