Economic issues are at the heart of the crisis in scholarly communication, and are also central to emerging principles and practices in digital publishing. On the one hand, scholarly journal publishing has become commercialized and market forces have inflated costs for these necessary academic tools well out of proportion to other academic costs. On the other hand, electronic publication within academia promises the possibility of publication at little or no expense (se Open Access).

Scholars are being urged to use alternative publishing models and to support competetive alternatives to the present profit-oriented system (see Advocacy). To achieve profitability, commercial scholarly publishing restricts access to its scholarly products by controlling copyright (see Intellectual Property Issues). Scholars and their host institutions are being urged to negotiate with publishers to retain certain publication rights so that authors and universities maintain control of the intellectual property they create or sponsor.

Libraries are taking several measures to deal with the changing economic landscape of academia: establishing institutional repositories for the publication and preservation of local scholarly work, measuring usage to determine which journals' subscriptions will be canceled, promoting access and submissions to open access journals (see Directory of Open Access Journals), and establishing consortia to share costs for resources. Much debate also centers around appropriate pricing models for scholarly journals.

See "The Facts: The Economics of Publishing" (University of California Office of Scholarly Communications <http://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/facts/econ_of_publishing.html>) A comprehensive bibliography on economic issues can be found within Charles W. Bailey, Jr.'s Scholarly Electronic Publishing Bibliography <http://info.lib.uh.edu/sepb/>.