--- [SH: I'll reply here to save time and minimize misunderstandings: This comment seems to be missing the point, which is that refereed journal authors (unlike most other authors) are not writing for the access-fee. There is no contingency whatsoever between the benefits of publishing in a peer-reviewed journal and the fact that consumers are paying a fee to access it; quite the contrary. To redescribe the status quo is not to advance our understanding of it: The savings from doing away with access fees (S/SL/PPV) at the "consumer" end will be enough to cover the residual costs at the "provider" end thrice over; no author is out of pocket and the entire learned community gains.] --- The second flaw is the assumption that the costs of editing and redacting amount to only 1/3 of the total cost of publishing. That is questionable. Even if it is true, as online publishing substantially replaces print (except for archiving, where no better alternative is in sight), total costs to the reader will decrease. The trend for nonprofit publishers (i.e, professional societies) is to bundle the online version with the print subscription; when the print subscriptions is included in the membership dues, the online version is made free to members, perhaps with a small increase in dues to cover costs. Marvin Margoshes --- [SH: There has been some quantitative discussion in the Forum about this matter; the underlying issue concerns whether it makes sense to continue to recover the much reduced online-only costs through access-tolls; see especially the postings of Mark Doyle on this 70/30 thread concerning the true costs and savings, and see the "S/SL/PPV's Trojan Horse" thread for a critique of the hybrid strategy for preserving access-fees that this commentator appears to be accepting as a matter of course. (About the superiority of archiving in paper I can only throw up my hands in despair...) SH]Received on Tue Aug 25 1998 - 19:17:43 BST
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.3.0 : Fri Dec 10 2010 - 19:45:29 GMT