The crisis in scholarly communication refers to a breakdowm in the productive exchange of academic knowledge due to the escalating costs of academic journals (especially in the sciences), diminishing support for academic presses, and the lack of clear standards for structuring, accessing, protecting, and evaluating the emerging modes of digital scholarship.

The crisis can be measured by the inability of academic libraries to support scholarly research as they cannot maintain costly subscriptions; by the difficulties scholars face in tenure and promotion when conventional print publishing is becoming more difficult while electronic scholarship remains largely unrecognized as legitimate; and by the problems academic institutions and organizations face as they adjust their infrastructure and academic cultures to accommodate the new modes of producing, accessing, evaluating, preserving, and promoting scholarship in the digital age.