I definitely agree that libraries need to be more aggressive about revealing costs to faculty and in engaging with faculty about costs. But I’ll say that from my experience (5 years now of running an IR) that many just don’t care or believe that high journals costs just come with territory (this is in the STM area in particular). We also face enormous pressures from university administrations to provide these resources as well.

It’s easy to point to the back and forth between libraries and publishers and the lack of transparency of costs – all things that need to be improved. Dorothea is right about SPARC (who supported the Rights to Research site and is heavily funded by libraries) and ARL needing to push their membership forward. But what I think really continues to be a problem is the paucity of faculty discussion and engagement with their colleagues across disciplines as well as campus level administrators in this discussion. It’s one thing for me as a librarian to talk to faculty about costs; it’s another thing entirely for another faculty member to have that discussion. Frankly, that’s when I think we’d begin to have more movement in the form of OA policies (like MIT), infrastructure development to support faculty experiments in OA, etc, as well as much more informed conversations about costs.