On Wed, 2 Jun 1999, Arthur Smith wrote: > <http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/04-01/day.html> > the article, by Colin Day, is titled "Digital Alternatives: > Solving the Problem or Shifting the Costs". The subject was > academic monographs rather than journal articles, but I think > many of the same arguments apply in both cases.
Not quite, for two very basic reasons: (1) Monographs, like most of the rest of the literature -- and unlike refereed journal articles -- are written to be sold, and the author hopes for some royalty revenue. (The royalties are often not much, and the authors of some monographs that are too esoteric for any market, and hence at some risk of not getting published at all, would gladly waive royalties just to have them appear. So in that respect some monographs do fit the no-royalty, no-fee, give-away criterion that separates the refereed journal literature -- and perhaps also esoteric conference proceedings -- from the normal trade literature. But this only represents a minority of monographs.) (2) Self-publishing of monographs (unlike self-archiving or refereed journals articles) bypasses peer review. However, those monographs that do fit the give-away formula, if they are peer reviewed by a reputable monograph series, could indeed benefit from being self-archived in a free archive rather than remaining stillborn for want of a market to pay their conventional publication costs. Ditto for conference proceedings, both refereed and unrefereed. The work that goes into the creation, revision, mark-up and self-archiving of 6-12 journal articles is probably equivalent to the work that goes into doing the same with a monograph. So in that respect the shoe fits, and I would argue that self-archiving is indeed the optimal route for give-away monographs of this sort. There would accordingly probably be a niche for "virtual monograph" publishers (or a virtual branch of a paper monograph publisher) who would provide rigorous peer review and a prestigious imprimatur to virtual monograph series, archived exactly the same way refereed articles are. Apart from the quality control, most of the document preparation is being off-loaded onto authors already anyway. Once on-screen editors and version-controllers are optimized, and windows-based XML or SGML tagging platforms are perfected, authors will be able to handle it all with minimal effort. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Stevan Harnad har...@cogsci.soton.ac.uk Professor of Cognitive Science har...@princeton.edu Department of Electronics and phone: +44 1703 592-582 Computer Science fax: +44 1703 592-865 University of Southampton http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/ Highfield, Southampton http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/ SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/