I have only one improvement to make to Eberhard's proposal:
A better way to get the funds is from not maintaining the
printed journals (or their electronic twins) at all.
I foresee only one problem:
Outside the physical sciences, few subject areas have a society strong
enough to do this.
I can see only one place where Mark might object:
Money for permanent archiving to his standards.
But he has never stated what his standards are that would not be met by
the proposed system using currently available technology,
though several of us have asked him to. If there really is something there
that's expensive and necessary, we will have to make provision for it.
He is much more expert at such matters
than I am, so I want to know what I am not aware of.
Dr. David Goodman
Research Librarian and
Biological Sciences Bibliographer
Princeton University Library
dgoodman_at_princeton.edu 609-258-7785
On Wed, 3 Apr 2002, Eberhard R. Hilf wrote:
> dear Mark,
> following the discussion on both channels I am worried about the
> 'abstract' nature of it.
>
> APS asks for a solid proposition for a future scenario with a sound
> business model?
> It seems that you start from assuming that the short cut of free access
> full texts available on the web from the author to the reader
> (by either his server, distributed services or central archives)
> is inevitable. Thats fine.
>
> The future role of the learned societies such as APS as the leading one in
> Physics is the same as ever: serve the physicists with
> professional services for their daily work.
> APS as society's information management competence center instead of
> document distribution center.
>
> That means here: a bundle of services to manage scientific documents:
> * intelligent personalized retrieval
> * crossreference across all sources, including inst.-webservers,
> * virtual subfield collections and alerting
> * professional offline refereeing (refereeing after dissemination of the
> documents, and independent of where it resides (even across publishers of
> course); closest to this is the successful 'living reviews of
> Gen.Relativity', although far too slow), that is referees who are experts
> (and might even be paid by APS) to oversee actively their field and the
> new papers and read them and referee/summarize openly.
> * permanently updating collection of authors tools to help them writing
> and transferring to MathML/XML in a 'state of the art' way.
> [Revtex 4 was in that respect at that time the best tool by concept].
> * etc.
>
> The business model follows from this:
> * registered users [Members of the society APS or associated societies
> (DPG) for free, who paid with their fee: thus contracts with the other
> major societies (how much per member would be an estimate?]
> * registered Institutes, Libraries
> * anyone from Industry by registration (highest fee,..).
>
> Example: we as a small physicist group of 10 pay at present 1.000,-$ per
> year and person for computer programmes, and a virtual share of about
> 100,-$ per year and person to the library for journals, and about 50,-$
> per year per person for society membership fees. We always use the
> computers, but miss a surrounding to use MAthML-Physics etc., never go to
> the library since the web exists, and see virtually nothing from our
> society (apart from the 17 docs per year of NJP..).
> Estimate for the above mentioned services 100,-$ per year and person,
> would add in physics to more than APS and those few other physics
> societies (IoPP?, JPS?, not DPG) who are willing to serve and improve
> those services would ever need? [500.000 physicists worldwide make up thus
> for 50 Mill. $ per year, enough?]
>
> Transition period: charge the printed copies of APS much higher, and
> reduce the online versions gradually to zero.
>
> Dear Mark, I am shure you will quickly bomb down these naive propositions.
> But still I would be glad for an answer. Since DPG is starting a server,
> where we invited APS to join with services and which could serve as a
> marketing place for these services http://www.fachportal-physik.de/
>
> Ebs
>
> .................................................
> Eberhard R. Hilf, Dr. Prof.i.R.;
> CEO Institute for Science Networking
> an der Carl von Ossietzky Universitaet Oldenburg
> Ammerlaender Heerstr.121; D-26129 Oldenburg
> ISN: http://www.isn-oldenburg.de/
> my homepage: http://physnet.uni-oldenburg.de/~hilf
> hilf_at_physnet.uni-oldenburg.de tel/Fax: 0049-441-798-2884/5851
> PhysNet for the EPS: http://physnet.uni-oldenburg.de/PhysNet
>
>
> On Tue, 2 Apr 2002, Mark Doyle wrote:
>
> > On Tuesday, April 2, 2002, at 01:08 PM, Stevan Harnad wrote:
> >
> > > I have invited Mark Doyle of APS to specify concretely what parallel
> > > measures he is recommending that BOAI pursue in order to ensure true
> > > archiving in the long-term. BOAI's mandate is to hasten and facilitate
> > > open access for the entire peer-reviewed corpus, now, but if there are
> > > concrete parallel measures that do not retard the primary objective,
> > > I am sure that BOAI will be happy to take them on board. Unfortunately,
> > > Mark's (somewhat piqued) reply is far too vague to consititute a
> > > concrete
> > > recommendation:
> >
> > Suffice it to say that a concrete recommendation will be forthcoming (not
> > in days, but months most likely). My main goal is to raise awareness at
> > institutions
> > and libraries that want to promote non-publisher archiving of research
> > articles. They
> > should consider carefully what kind of infrastructure should be built and
> > understand what costs are involved so that can be covered in any new
> > economic model that is to supplant the subscription model. Such
> > understanding
> > may be helpful for extant journals trying to undo the subscription model
> > and
> > for establishing alternative journals on a sound financial footing
> > without
> > losing some important benefits provided by the status quo.
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Mark
> >
> > Mark Doyle
> > Manager, Product Development
> > The American Physical Society
> > doyle_at_aps.org
> >
>
Received on Wed Apr 03 2002 - 19:04:11 BST