During the period 1955-95, the relationship between commercial publishers of scholarly journals and university libraries changed in two significant respects. The importance of each to the other grew, while, paradoxically, the relationship deteriorated. The period began with Robert Maxwell, acting for his Pergamon Press, beginning to exploit the enormous commercial potential in the publishing of scientific journals. As Pergamon and other large commercial publishers continued to capitalize on this potential, academic libraries, who were and are the primary customer base for scientific and technical journal publishing programs, found it increasingly difficult to justify the skewed proportion of their budgets spent on an ever-growing number of journal titles, and even harder to absorb the huge periodic increases in subscription prices. Because the nature of journal publishing makes each publisher of each title a monopolist, and because libraries are largely captive customers, the financial strain on libraries shows no sign of letting up. Libraries then are cancelling subscriptions, moving to a just-in-time service model, and are considering the case for the'emergent model'for disseminating scientific and technical information, under which model scholarly communication would take place largely on an electronic network, reducing the power of the commercial publishers. Unless those publishers initiate significant change in their cost and access policies, we may well see journals publication as we now know it removed from their hands entirely.