Having worked through the Serials Crisis in the 1990’s and the digitization of scholarship during the same period, I’ve long been interested on the inter-connectedness between technological change and commercial academic publishing. I am interested in this because nothing has had a greater impact on the ability of academic libraries to meet the information needs of their users than the ways in which commercial publishers have harnessed technological change to re-package scholarly information. The history of how scholarly publishing has adapted to changes in academia throughout the past century, both technological and demographic, is not well enough known to the library community.
To me the capacity to feel fear is Nature’s way of making us aware of dangers in our environment. Looked at this way, being completely fearless is foolish. The trick is to relate to fear wisely by responding to it without being overwhelmed by it.
One article that got me interested in this subject is, “Precursor to the serials crisis: German science publishing in the 1930s,” by Hendrik Edelman in the Journal of Scholarly Publishing; April 1994, Vol. 25, p171-178.