Endings and Beginnings

533 " [Everything] has to come to an end, sometime. " L. Frank Baum The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904) 1 As our regular readers know, this is a very special issue of College & Research Libraries. It is the last one that we will print. Beginning with the first issue of volume 75 (January 2014), this journal will join many others in being published solely in digital form. The road to this decision has been explained before , and C&RL readers are well-informed regarding the seismic changes currently reshaping academic publishing and the broader system of scholarly communication. C&RL will not be the first scholarly journal to move to a digital-only publishing model, and it will not be the first to embrace open access publishing, but it is still unusual to see a journal with the history and reputation that C&RL enjoys dive into the future of scholarly publishing with both feet. We know it was an unusual decision because of the number of scholarly associations that have contacted us to discuss our decision-making process, and we know it was the right decision because of the work that the Association of College & Research Libraries has done over the past decade to explore best practices in open access publishing and to contribute to the future of scholarly communications. It has been six years since the Association advanced its " Research Agenda for Scholarly Communication, " which included the call to promote research in areas such as authorship, value metrics, and the adoption of successful innovations. 2 As a print publication, C&RL provided a venue for disseminating the results of such research, including Malenfant's study of scholarly communications services as an emergent component of the core responsibilities of liaison librarians, Nariani and Fernadez's study of the factors influencing Endings and Beginnings authors' decisions to publish (or to avoid publishing) in open access journals, and Walters and Linvill's study of the characteristics of open access journals. 3 Most recently, a study by Ramirez et. al. of the connections (perceived and actual) between the decision to publish an electronic thesis or dissertation (ETD) in an open access repository and the impact of that decision on the potential for later publication in a traditional format became part of a broader discussion in the higher education press. 4 In short order (as these things go), C&RL has moved from subscription access to open access, …