At 03:27 PM 5/12/99 -0400, you wrote:
>On Wed, 12 May 1999 13:10:27 -0400, Thomas J. Walker
<tjw_at_GNV.IFAS.UFL.EDU> wrote:
>
>>I submit that APA
>
>S, not A!!! It's aps.org!
Sorry. I'm a little dyslexic.
>
>> would be more fiscally responsible and be doing more for
>>facilitating the transition from the current user-pays system to a future
>>author-pays system by charging for the service of putting the refereed,
>>formatted, archived versions of articles on xxx immediately upon
>>publication.
>
>My argument here has been that fiscal responsibility, unless we go to
>a different copyright licensing scheme, seems to require a large
>charge (up to $1500) to cover our first-copy costs, but such a large
>fee is not likely to facilitate any transition. Maybe we could get away
>with a smaller charge at first, but if it was taken up in any significant
>numbers then we really would be subject to various threats to subscription
>revenues.
I don't understand why the choices have to be:
(1) give the service away
(2) forbid authors to do it themselves, but let them get away with doing it
(3) charge the price you think you would have to charge if APS were in the
all-e future.
Until libraries and other subscribers start cancelling subscriptions, why
not make some money by offering the service at a modest mark-up, while
being up front with your authors that they are not coming close to paying
for the service they are getting (but they don't need to for the time being
because libraries are taking up the slack.) You should also be up front
that as subscriptions decline the price will have to go up and authors who
choose not to pay will have to be content with their unrefereed e-prints
being on xxx until the embargo period of 1 or 2 years has passed.
Unless we could somehow distinguish between the PDF version or
>whatever is posted to xxx and the other versions (XML, perhaps) we make
>available. There may be a way to do this that makes sense, but I don't
>see it there yet.
>
My papyrocentric view is that so long as paper is the archived version,
most researchers would prefer the APS-posted, official PDF version rather
than anything the author could legally self-archive. If that is the case,
researchers would have a variety of choices as to when and how their
articles become publicly Web accessible. The safety valves on this system
would be that APS would post to xxx the official version of all articles a
year or two after publication and that authors could immediately post their
own renderings of the refereed version (but not PDF files made by scanning
the official versions). Without these features, some authors might claim
that APS is forcing them to violate the copyright agreements they have signed.
Cheers,
Tom
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Thomas J. Walker
Department of Entomology & Nematology
University of Florida, PO Box 110620, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620
E-mail: tjw_at_gnv.ifas.ufl.edu FAX: (352)392-0190
Web:
http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/tjwbib/walker.htm
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Received on Wed Feb 10 1999 - 19:17:43 GMT