On Fri, 24 Sep 1999, Fytton Rowland wrote:
> I basically agree with Stevan Harnad, but I am beginning to have some
> concern that the "residual" cost that has to be borne by the author's
> institution is not so very negligible. Paul Gherman on this list recently
> suggested $1000 per article. The Institute of Physics' (IoP) New Journal
> of Physics charges $500. Halliday & Oppenheim in my department recently
> separately arrived at a figure quite close to Gherman's, and suggested that
> the IoP's figure was therefore too low for financial viability. This is a
> far cry from the (genuinely negligible) amount suggested by the Florida
> Society for Entomology. These high figures, if correct, do call into
> question the viability of the new Harnadian system.
Take the estimate from the current online-only journals, such as the
Journal of High Energy Physics <
http://jhep.cern.ch/> -- they are
probably closest to the mark. And JHEP estimates $300 per paper (minus
startup, and assuming multiple journals on the same system).
And in doing the calculation, don't compare Journal X's current annual
subscription rate for your University to the current annual number of
author/articles from your University in Journal X. Do the figure over
your University's entire annual periodical budget, relative to its
entire annual number of author/articles in all journals.
For the new system will only work when virtually all S/L/P costs are
gone. For now there is still an unstable transition region in between.
Until we work out a rational transition strategy (see American
Scientist Forum on that thread, below), author self-archiving is the
way to go.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
Stevan Harnad harnad_at_cogsci.soton.ac.uk
Professor of Cognitive Science harnad_at_princeton.edu
Department of Electronics and phone: +44 23-80 592-582
Computer Science fax: +44 23-80 592-865
University of Southampton
http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/
Highfield, Southampton
http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/
SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM
Received on Wed Feb 10 1999 - 19:17:43 GMT