Another possible set of factors in this situation includes the increasing domination of scholarly communication by a small number of commercial publishers, whose journals are far more costly than those of most non-profit academic societies.
The report further states that: the no–cancellation clauses attached to their multi-year multi-journal deals with Elsevier and the American Chemical Society had led to uneven cancellation of titles to make the budget balance.
Libraries have seen their collection budgets decline in real terms compared to the United States Periodical Price Index.
As a result of the increasing cost of journals, academic libraries have reduced their expenditures on other types of publications such as scholarly monographs.
As the United States and Europe publish the vast majority of scholarly journals, libraries in other regions are subject to ever greater uncertainty.
Although exchange rates can go down as well as up, long-term trends in currency values can lead to chronic price inflation experienced by particular libraries or collections.
[citation needed] Many individual libraries have joined co-operative consortia that negotiate license terms for journal subscriptions on behalf of their member institutions.
[14] Services emerged for libraries to share information and reduce the information asymmetry in negotiations with the publishers, like the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) cancellation tracking[15] and the Unsub data analysis tool.
[citation needed] Developed in part as a response to the serials crisis, open access models have included new models of financing scholarly journals that may serve to reduce the monopoly power of scholarly journal publishers which is considered a contributing factor to the creation of the serials crisis.