WHO WILL PAY FOR WHAT?

From: Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_coglit.ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Mon, 10 Jul 2000 21:32:51 +0100

On Mon, 10 Jul 2000, Marvin wrote:

> Max Frankel..NY Times Magazine (Sunday, July 9):
>
> "when will you get The Nirvana News?... not until the Web
> worshipers quit their rhapsodizing about "free" digital news and
> figure out a way to pay for its production. The Web has not
> produced very good reporter robots or electronic editors. Nor has
> it figured out how to pay the costly humans needed to gather,
> interpret, write and package information in the coming world."
>
> Frankel wrote about newspapers, but most of his column is equally
> applicable for scholarly publications.

How is it applicable, Marvin? It is researchers who gather, interpret,
write and package their research reports. The only thing they cannot do
for themselves is the Quality-Control and its Certification (QCC).

> Most newspapers pay their writers, scholarly journals don't. Both have
> costs beyond paying (or not paying) for manuscripts.

If authors self-archive their final refereed drafts, and the distributed
institutional Open Archives house them in perpetuo, what exactly are
those further costs, other than QCC?

> Keeping in mind "he who pays the piper calls the tune", we need some
> realistic discussion on who will pay for free-to-the-reader scholarly
> publication. I didn't hear it at the meeting, and I haven't seen much
> on this forum.

And here I was, thinking that maybe I was repeating the formula too
often: Have you seen much of this formula? SLP - 70%(SLP) = QCC

Stevan Harnad
Received on Mon Jan 24 2000 - 19:17:43 GMT