I am amazed that we have been fairly cognizant of this
problem for decades, but so little has happened. However, I think
the commercial publishers may have gone too far and the scientific
community is waking up to the problems. Other disciplines are
roaring mad about it and moving to make changes on their own. For
example, the Public Library of Science and journals issued by BEPress
on-line. And our societies still produce bargain
journals.
Rod said it all in his JP comment of 1989. Others are saying it
with increasing frequency now.
Here's one way to decide where to publish: Ask yourself, can I
afford to subscribe myself to this journal (check both individual and
institutional rates) I am considering publishing in. If not,
find one you could afford that has good citation indexes, plates, figures
and everything else you want. Not that you need to subscribe,
but its a good guideline.
And a comment for you dinosaurologists who have been ranting and raving
about how feathered dinosaurs flew and what they did. Just
think: You could publish your stuff on Palaeo Electronica with
colored illustrations of those feathers, with sounds that they made while
attacking each other, with movies of them flying from the ground up or
the trees down, with 3-D reconstructions of the scales and feathers that
could be manipulated by everyone else who disagrees, or with
combinations, like a nasty egg-eating dino crunching eggs in its
feather-bedecked beak with the yokes running down little grooves in its
chin and its tongue making little slurping sounds. Or
whatever they did. You could do it better on-line than in any
paper journal. Then all of you could cite that paper for good or
bad, and soon the journal would be top-ranked!
And every little kid in the world would access it and send you
corrections. What else could you ask for, other than a live
one!
Jere
At 10:55 AM 4/14/2005, you wrote:
Jere.
Sometime, if you have nothing better to do, read, Feldmann, R. M. 1989.
On the cost of journal subscriptions. Journal of Paleontology, 63:
958. The problem has a long history and the society-sponsored
journals seem to me to be the only sensible solution.
Rod
Dr. Rodney Feldmann
Department of Geology
Kent State University
Kent, OH 44242 USA
Phone: 330-672-2506
FAX: 330-672-7949
e-mail: rfeldman@kent.edu
Website:
http://www.kent.edu/geology