There have been various comments on our Association's reaction to the
Budapest Open Access Initiative. Our response seems to have been
somewhat misunderstood: we do not oppose initiatives which advocate the
widest possible access to information - far from it, since dissemination
is part of the mission of most of our member societies. However, we
believe that it is essential that a business model is first found which
will pay for all the elements which researchers value. Contrary to
Stevan's view, researchers - as authors and as readers - do value very
highly the whole spectrum of functions which publishers traditionally
perform, and not just peer review itself. Our latest, recently
completed, research study established very high ratings for all of the
following (listed in order of importance): management (as distinct from
execution) of the peer review process; selection of relevant and
quality-controlled content; gathering articles together to enable
browsing of relevant and quality-controlled content; content editing
and improvement of articles; language or copy-editing; checking of
citations/adding citation links; and (even) marketing (maximising
visibility of journal). Respondents predominantly believe that
libraries should continue to pay for these processes in some way, and
clearly more thinking and experimentation is urgently needed both on
viable alternative business models, and on the potential migration path
towards these. Interestingly, other than in physics, respondents mostly
had little or no idea what we meant by preprint or eprint archives.
The full results of the study, Authors and Electronic Publishing, will
be available for sale very shortly and details will appear on our
website,
http://www.alpsp.org
One small clarification - Bernard Lang was under the impression that
members only permitted free archival access to authors. This is not
what I meant; a growing number of our member publishers make their
online archival volumes freely accessible to all after a certain period.
Sally
Sally Morris, Secretary-General
Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers
South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex BN13 3UU, UK
Phone: 01903 871686 Fax: 01903 871457 E-mail: sec-gen_at_alpsp.org
ALPSP Website
http://www.alpsp.org
Learned Publishing is now online, free of charge, at
www.learned-publishing.org
Received on Mon Apr 08 2002 - 18:22:58 BST