Provosts' Ears and Red Herrings Stevan suggests:
And, yes, it's quite obvious what needs to be done: Have a talk with the university's provost. He is the one in the best position to weigh the relative merits of the two conflicting university interests: (1) to maximize university press journal revenue, on the one hand, and (2) to maximize university research impact and income (as well as to invest
It does it does seem like a good idea that somebody should be talking to university provosts about this. I will take a shot at talking (actually sending a message to -- he is 250 miles away) the UC provost. But who do you suggest should be bending the provostial ears at Chicago, Oxford, MIT, etc.
But let me add, again, that the publisher's PDF is a red herring and is *unnecessary*: Just self-archive the author's postprint and link it to the publisher's for-fee website for those who may want the publisher's PDF; that's all that's needed -- and a more than fair quid pro quo.)
Stevan, saying things repeatedly does not make them true. And, sadly, you can't make problems disappear just by calling them red herrings. I agree that it is better to be able to self-archive one's own version of the final copy than not to be able to do so at all. But it is even better, both from the point of view of administrative convenience and of accuracy of the bibliographic record to be able to post the actual publishers' pdf file. As you are well aware, getting faculty to post their work is not as easy as you and I think it should be. For those publishers who allow posting of the publishers' pdf, the administrative hassle is almost zero. A departmental administrator can simply ask the author for permission to put it on the website and put it up on the archive. It is a lot harder getting many authors to go to the trouble of assembling the last version of the paper, incorporating the final corrections, running it through Word or TeX and making a pdf file. To you or me this may not seem a big deal. To my colleagues? That is another story. A final word on this matter. It would be helpful if those publishers who can not see their way to allow posting of recent pdf's would allow them to be posted with a lag of, say a year, like MIT Press. There can't be much gain in prohibiting posting of old articles. There ought to be some room for negotiation here. Ted Bergstrom