I have been following this forum and finding the discussion fascinating.
There appear to be several threads under which I could make this comment,
but let me do it here.
One thing we deal with in the American Meteorological Society Journals is
that scientists from some countries are prohibited from paying page charges
with government research funds. Thus, we have some fraction of our content
for which we cannot obtain page charge support (for example, research
coming out of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasting
located in the UK). We publish these articles without prejudice, of
course, but in reality they are being subsidized by those articles for
which we do receive page charge support, and because some of our operating
costs come through our subscription revenue.
Given this situation, we have always felt that it would be best if we could
decrease our dependence on page charges to cover our publication costs. I
find it interesting that in all the discussion that has taken place here so
far on using page charges as the primary means of covering costs, no one
has pointed out that there is a large number of scientists who would be
prohibited by their national regulations from paying in this way.
Keith Seitter
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Dr. Keith L. Seitter phone: 617-227-2426 ext. 220
Associate Executive Director fax: 617-742-8718
American Meteorological Society e-mail: kseitter_at_ametsoc.org
45 Beacon Street
Boston, MA 02108-3693
http://www.ametsoc.org/AMS
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Received on Tue Aug 25 1998 - 19:17:43 BST