Re: Journal costs

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Stefan and I really agree on most aspects of the coming brave new world of
paleo. publishing, we just like needling each other over the relative
merits of electronic and print formats. ;-> I agree that we should not
wholly abandon print publishing in paleo. I don't think I said that we
should take such a drastic step in my post. Only that electronic publishing
is an obvious way to break out of the print publishing cycle of cost
increases without sacrificing quality. On this score I would take the same
broad view of "electronic publishing" that Stefan does and include
print-on-demand, access-on-demand, technologies, even if the final product
is contained on a piece of paper. After all, I can print the full text,
graphics, tables, etc. of any article published on the WWW, on demand, on
my laserprinter.

However, the other point I was trying to make is that from the librarian's
perspective, electronic publishing may not be the panacea it is sometimes
promoted as. There can be real and substantial costs that lie in wait for
libraries who want to be able to collect and provide access to large
numbers of electronic publications. Whether or not these expenses occur is
to a large extent dependent on what the librarians mean by "providing
access" to electronic publications. If all this means is that you'll be
able to walk over to the library and check out a CD just as you would a
book or a journal volume, perhaps electronic publishing can make a big
savings in library budgets. However, if "access" is defined to mean the
sorts of things Stefan is talking about in his post, or even simple network
access to the electronic copy in the library's collections, then we're off
into another high-tech world and the price tags that go with it. Which one
is it going to be (or which combination of the two)? This is an aspect of
electronic publication that I don't think gets nearly enough attention.
Since electronic journals are already a reality in many fields, how are
libraries handling things now? How do they expect to handle them in the
future? I definitely want to see electronic publishing take off in a big
way in paleo. Therefore, I'm concerned about this issue.


Norm MacLeod





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Dr. Norman MacLeod
Micropalaeontological Research
N.MacLeod@nhm.ac.uk (E-mail)

Address: Department of Palaeontology, The Natural History Museum,
         Cromwell Road, London, SW7 5BD

Office Phone: 0171-938-9006
Dept. FAX: 0171-938-9277
E-mail: N.MacLeod@nhm.ac.uk
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