A (very) belated response:
On Mon Mar 4, Arthur Smith (apsmith_at_aps.org) asked:
My father (who lives in Canada and reads the Globe & Mail regularly)
was just asking me about this article :-) I hope Andrew Odlyzko
was misquoted on the "do the same thing for $100,000"! Perhaps he'll
explain himself...
The precise quote from the Globe & Mail article by Stephen Strauss is:
... Another approach, and one that has already been
extensively used in physics and astronomy, is to publish "pre-prints." In
this case, papers that have been peer-reviewed but not yet published
elsewhere are posted on a server site. University of Minnesota
mathematician Andrew Odlyzko has argued that conventional publishing of the
20,000 papers one such site stores a year would require an investment of
$40-million to $80-million. The electronic pre-prints do the same thing for
$100,000.
Note that I am not quoted directly. In fact, Stephen Strauss did not ask
me for such a comparison during our phone interview, but rather based this
passage in the Globe & Mail on my published articles, where, indeed, I do
cite Paul Ginsparg's archive as achieving very low costs, but where I also
make it clear that this is costs for archiving and dissemination only,
and is not "the same thing" that traditional journals do.
I hope this clarifies the issue.
Andrew
-----Please note new address-----
Andrew Odlyzko
University of Minnesota
Digital Technology Center
499 Walter Library
117 Pleasant St. SE
Minneapolis, MN 55455
odlyzko_at_umn.edu email
612-624-9510 voice phone
612-625-2002 fax
http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko
Received on Sat Mar 30 2002 - 22:54:41 GMT