On Fri, Jan 27, 2012 at 12:48 PM, Bruce Sherwood <bruce.sherw...@gmail.com>wrote:
> There are real costs that someone must pay. A promising approach > adopted by some physics journals is to have the authors pay, with > readers having free access. NSF considers author publication fees a > reasonable part of doing business, and physicists are including these > costs in grant proposals. In some cases there are "scholarships" for > truly needy submitters. > > Bruce Just like Hollywood, I do agree. There are costs and I don't mind reasonable payment methods. Intelligent media folks worked with Apple for DRM-free music, and are doing just fine. Amazon's cloud music is quickly catching up. Google has just started a music business. The payments are reasonable and the cloud access even a step forward, adding true value. In the book world, Kindle/Amazon is working on lending ebooks to friends and libraries as well as ubiquitous cloud access. But for me the academic publishers are dinosaurs. The most egregious is ACM the computing publishers where even the Turing lectures are for sale! And no academic can possibly subscribe to all the journals touching on their career. They rely on their university having JSTOR access. And just how much value does Elsevier (and others) add? Certainly if you want the paper version, or a digital subscription, of a journal that is key to your work, fine. But if you're only looking for a single computer algorithm or mathematical proof, isn't $35 a bit over the top? Basically I think academic publishers are failing to join the present day while other publishers are finding ways to add value and have reasonable prices. I just hope they don't try to copy write all of Euler! -- Owen
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