The soaring prices of scholarly and scientific journals have forced academic libraries used only by academic researchers to drastically reduce their list of subscriptions
Some have suggested that in each academic discipline subscription decisions should be determined solely by a journal' s usefulness in that discipline, measured by the frequency with which it is cited in published writings by researchers in the discipline
In some academic disciplines, controversies which begin in the pages of one journal spill over into articles in other journals that are widely read by researchers in the discipline.