Re: New York Times article on serials crisis and publisher mergers

From: Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_coglit.ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Tue, 7 Nov 2000 15:34:49 +0000

On Fri, 3 Nov 2000, Barry Markovitz wrote:

> The New York Times today reported about the serials crisis in
> scholarly libraries and the implications of Bertelsmann buying
> Harcourt. There is certainly cause for concern that fewer and fewer
> publishers... result in higher and higher prices. One of
> two paragraphs mentioned the lunacy of the journals getting their
> material for free and the peer[s] review[ing for free] as well...
>
> No mention of the eprint project.

Not surprising. The popular press's main function is FOLLOWING the
news, not FACILITATING it. The Eprint project <http://www.eprints.org>
will be picked up by the press once it's already history. For now,
it's more of a head-shaker that researchers themselves have been
so slow off the mark!

In case any of you have pop-press connections, here are a few
forthcoming talks at which the token just might drop:

    Distingushed Speaker lecture. Society for Computers in Psychology.
    November 16 2000 New Orleans
    http://www.gsu.edu/~lrcdaw/scip3.htm#Session XIV

    "Freeing the Scientific Research Literature Online
    Through Author Auto-Archiving".
    Psychonomic Society Annual Meeting.
    November 17 2000 New Orleans.
    http://www.psychonomic.org/meeting.htm

    Roundtable on Subversive Proposal. American Historical Society.
    January 4-8 2001 Boston 2001.
    http://www.theaha.org/annual/program/program.html

    Keynote. 10th Australasian Information Online Conference.
    Sydney Australia, 13th to 22th January, 2001
    http://www.csu.edu.au/special/online2001/index.html

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Professor of Cognitive Science harnad_at_princeton.edu
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Received on Mon Jan 24 2000 - 19:17:43 GMT

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