Too many chemistry jou• rnals*SIR: We are writing to communicate to our colleagues our joint concern over the recent proliferation of journals in chemistry.We shall not discuss the overall growth in the number of papers published. That is another matter. We are concerned here with the quality of the literature, its cost to the libraries of our institutions, and how publication is organized.1) Today a publisher can start a journal in almost any part of chemistry and, by charging a high subscription price, can apparently make a profit, relying only on sale to libraries. The libraries are a captive market. They have assumed that they must buy every journal published irrespective of its overall quality.2) The new journals generally do not require publication charges from the authors, but subsist on the high subscription prices. In some countries the result of increased publication in these journals is a general shift of the burden of supporting publication from the government agencies (which generally pay the researchers' publication charges) to universities (which support the libraries). In other countries money, which the universities could otherwise use for research, goes to meet the blownup library costs. The budgets of university library systems are overburdened. Several libraries have had to institute a freeze on the ordering of new •Reprinted from Chemical & Engineering NeW8, December 10, 1973 by permission of copyright owner, the American Chemical Society .

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