The already existing and future economic atmosphere will significantly affect scientific publishing during the next several years. Distributors and retailers are joining what was essentially a one-component (i.e., the publisher-manufacturer) industry. The original product (the journal or book) is spawning a wide variety of secondary, derivative, and aftermarket information products. It is becoming possible to deal in machine-readable information equivalents, e.g., a scientist's current workbook entries, rather than with a post-experiment journal paper describing the research.

One professional in six is an information literate. He knows where and how to find what is known or knowable in his field. The function of the reference librarian who keeps track of our interests and saves items for our use needs to become an institutional part of all professional lives. Journal subscribers who find one article annually relevant to their work in their professional publication subscribe for that one article. Its value is more closely related to the cost of the subscription than to the cost of photocopying. A changed perception of the value of information is a basic element in the new economics of journal publishing flowing from the Senate mandated "workable licensing and clearance" procedures. A method for institutionalizing the sorting process characterized in the reference library as a method for increasing information literacy is a necessary corollary to such licensing and clearance procedures.