Title: Reposting of: [For-profit journals and electronic
publishi
Thanks for raising this topic, Jere -
and for providing links to journal cost data. All of your
points are right on the mark, and I agree with all of your
recommendations except for avoidance of citing commercial journal
articles. As scientists and as members of a small scholarly
community, before we submit manuscripts to commercial journals, we
should each ask ourselves if there isn't a non-profit or
society-sponsored journal we could submit to.
Lisa is also right on the mark, and indeed our societies are in great
need of a new business model - largely due to the economic
wedging of our library budgets by the "bundling" business
model used by commercial journals produced by Elsevier, Springer,
Kluwer, and Blackwell.
I disagree with Lisa's suggestion that
electronic publication is just as expensive as print publication. It
is only as expensive if we (or our societies) hire commercial
publishing houses (like Allen Press, and any of the above listed
publishers non grata) to publish our journals for us. If we do
much of the work ourselves, (which, BTW, we're already doing as
authors), the costs are substantially less. For example, at
Palaeontologia Electronica (http://palaeo-electronica.org) and other open-access electronic journals, the
work _already_ being done by authors, reviewers, and editors
is leveraged to produce a very cost-effective
publication. This is the same work that we normally do for
both print and electronic journals - the major differences
are that: i) we are sponsored by our societies <please
join!>; ii) we don't mark up our production costs to make a profit
off of our societies or our community (as Allen Press and other
publishing houses do); and iii) we rely on the existing
infrastructure (servers, software, etc.) of our scholarly
community so do not incur additional infrastructural costs.
Thanks to support by the PalAss, SVP, PS, and other societies,
for example, PE is published at less than a tenth the cost
of many other journals.
Best regards,
Whitey Hagadorn
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Department of Geology
Amherst College
Amherst, MA 01002
http://www.amherst.edu/~jwhagadorn
jwhagadorn@amherst.edu ...enjoy the journey...
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