Open Access article from the Washington Post
Here's the beginning of and a link to an article that may be of interest (from Sigma Xi's Science-in-the-News mailing list): A FIGHT FOR FREE ACCESS TO MEDICAL RESEARCH from The Washington Post The family was poor, living on the Great Plains, and the child had a rare medical condition. "Here's what we can do," the family doctor told them. But it didn't work, recalled Michael Keller, who oversees the libraries at Stanford University. "So the family went to the Internet." Soon they were back at the doctor's office with a report of a new therapy. "They plunked it down and said, 'Hey, can we try this?' And guess what? It worked." Such tales are becoming increasingly common, but the happy endings come at a cost -- literally. That is because the vast majority of the 50,000 to 60,000 research articles published each year as a result of federally funded science ends up in the hands of for-profit publishers -- the largest of them based overseas -- that charge as much as $50 to view the results of a single study online. The child's parents, Keller said, paid for several papers before finding the one that led them to the cure. <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A19104-2003Aug4.html> Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology PO Box 110620 (or Natural Area Drive) University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@ufl.edu (or tjwal...@ifas.ufl.edu) FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/
Open Access Now
It seems worth reporting that Open Access Now, published online by BioMed Central (http://www.biomedcentral.com/openaccess/ ), is now included in print as the center fold of the print version of The Scientist (http://www.the-scientist.com/ ), a high-circulation biweekly. The most recent issue of Open Access Now (July 28) has extensive coverage of NIH's open access archive, PubMed Central and even notes the five traditional journals that offer authors the option of paying for open access by the article (at per-article prices ranging from US$1500 to 75% of the price of 100 paper reprints). Tom Walker Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology PO Box 110620 (or Natural Area Drive) University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@ufl.edu (or tjwal...@mail.ifas.ufl.edu) FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/
Re: Are "Open Access Reprints" a Unique Service?
At 05:45 PM 1/30/2003 +0100, Michael Jost wrote: Some of the journals in The Electronic Library of Mathematics (ELibM) http://www.emis.de/journals/index.html offer similar benefits, however, I'm not aware that one of them charges authors with a fee for that. So I think you cannot truthfully tell the ESA president that ESA's service is unique. I am interested in knowing if ESA is the only publisher that offers authors the _option_ of paying for immediate open access [to PDF files of articles in its paper-published journals]. From 1994 through 2000, Florida Entomologist gave open access to all its authors . Since that time it has charged _all_ authors a fee for the service (no option). Both of these means of providing open access differ significantly from what ESA is doing. Tom Walker ======== Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology PO Box 110620 (or Natural Area Drive) University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@ufl.edu (or tjwal...@mail.ifas.ufl.edu) FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/
Are "Open Access Reprints" a Unique Service?
Since January 2000, the Entomological Society of America has offered its authors the option of buying a package of services that will soon be renamed "Open Access Reprints". For less than the cost of 100 paper reprints (e.g., $95 for a 7-page article), authors may buy these benefits: (1) As soon as your article is published, ESA will post the PDF file on its Web server with access free to all. (2) You may immediately obtain the PDF file of your article from ESA's server and post it on your home page and on other publicly accessible web servers. You may also use it to send your article to colleagues as an e-mail attachment and to make as many "electronic reprints" of your article as you wish. (3) Anyone may freely read or print your article from the Internet and make as many copies for noncommercial purposes as they wish. (4) ESA will see that the full text of your article is accessible to the robots of public search services. For example, Google (http://www.google.com) will index the full text of your article on ESA's server, thereby helping the public find and access the full text of your article. QUESTION: Does any other publisher offer their authors a similar, optional package of services? My reason for asking this question is that after three years of silence ESA is planning to tell its members and authors about benefits (2) through (4). Can I truthfully tell the ESA president that ESA's service is unique? In other words, is ESA the only publisher that offers the above package of impact-enhancing services to authors who are willing to pay a modest price for immediate open access to their refereed, formatted articles. Note: Authors who sign ESA's copyright agreement cannot legally post the PDF files of their articles until 2 years after publication. Note: ESA currently sells Open Access Reprints, under the name "PDF Reprints," to 55% of its authors. Detailed figures and an account of ESA's flirtation with selling its authors open access from 1995 through 2002 is at http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/epub/esaepub.htm. Note: I am lobbying for ESA to increase its list of benefits. For example, (5) ESA will post your article on an OAI-compliant server. (6) ESA will post your article on PubMed Central. (7) ESA will encourage indexing services such as Current Contents Connect, Web of Science, Biosis, and CAB Abstracts to hotlink to the full text of your article. Note: Florida Entomological Society charges all its authors an open-access fee, but it is not optional. For details (including the fiscal results) see http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/epub/index.htm#epub. ==== Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology PO Box 110620 (or Natural Area Drive) University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@ufl.edu (or tjwal...@mail.ifas.ufl.edu) FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/
Market outlook for STM publishers
In case you want to know what Morgan Stanley market analysts think of investing in STM publishing, read this: http://www.biblio-tech.com/uksg/SI_PD.cfm?PID=10&ArticleID=469 Of course, they were probably pushing Enron and WorldCom not too long ago. ==== Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology PO Box 110620 (or Natural Area Drive) University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@ufl.edu (or tjwal...@mail.ifas.ufl.edu) FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/
Item from Science-in-the-News
From: inthenews Subject: Science In the News To: science-in-the-n...@listserver.sigmaxi.org RESEARCH REBEL URGES COLLEAGUES TO PUBLISH ON THE WEB, NOT IN HIGH-PRICED JOURNALS from The San Francisco chronicle Pat Brown, a biochemist at Stanford University, invented a cheap way to put thousands of bits of DNA on test slides, helping to pave the way for industrial-scale studies of how genes control cells. But spying out the secrets of cells is not what he likes to talk about these days. Brown has a new scheme in mind: He wants to raise about $20 million in foundation grants to bring together top scientists to review scientific research, and publish it on the Web -- for free. "We'll just give it away" to undercut the pricey subscription journals that dominate academic publishing, Brown said. <http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi? file=/chronicle/archive/2002/09/02/MN97506.DTL> ======== Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology PO Box 110620 (or Natural Area Drive) University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@ufl.edu (or tjwal...@mail.ifas.ufl.edu) FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/ ======== Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology PO Box 110620 (or Natural Area Drive) University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@ufl.edu (or tjwal...@mail.ifas.ufl.edu) FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/
Re: Should Publishers Offer Free-Access Services?
Late last April I posted a summary of a talk, at an ALPSP seminar, that described how two societies had profited from allowing immediate free Web access (IFWA) to articles in their journals. At the end of the summary, I provided this link to the PowerPoint version of the talk: "The talk and notes that go with it are accessible at http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/epub/ALPSP.htm"; I recently discovered that this link led to a much earlier talk rather than to the ALPSP talk. I've corrected the problem and my apologies to anyone who wasted time trying to figure out what was wrong with the link. Tom Walker ======== Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology PO Box 110620 (or Natural Area Drive) University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@ufl.edu (or tjwal...@mail.ifas.ufl.edu) FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/ ============ Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology PO Box 110620 (or Natural Area Drive) University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@ufl.edu (or tjwal...@mail.ifas.ufl.edu) FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/
Re: Excerpts from FOS Newsletter
At 09:40 PM 5/24/2002 +0100, you wrote: Excerpts from the Free Online Scholarship (FOS) Newsletter May 23, 2002 More on the big koan: self-archiving Following my essay in the last issue on why FOS progress has been slow, our discussion forum received many thoughtful postings. Have a look. There are two primary paths to FOS: open-access journals and self-archiving. Progress along both paths has been slower than our opportunities would allow. However, it's easier to explain slow movement along the first path [= BOAI Strategy 2] than along the second [= BOAI Strategy 1]. All eight of the points in my essay apply to open-access journals [S2], but only a few apply to self-archiving [S1] --namely, that scholars tend not to understand the problem, that they tend to misunderstand the solution, and that slow progress itself has created a vicious circle in which relatively few institutions have created eprints archives. There is a third path to FOS. Some may not consider it "primary", but it alone has the potential of changing toll-access journals to open-access journals in a fiscally safe manner. This third path could be termed fee-for-service open access. In this path, authors who wish open access for their articles are allowed to pay a fair price for it. Entomological Society of America (ESA) currently sets the fair price as 75% of the price of 100 paper reprints. In 2001, 51% of ESA authors chose fee-for-service open access to their articles, and ESA grossed more than $31,000 from those sales. Authors who don't value open access enough to pay a fair price for it must wait 2 years before ESA is willing to make their articles freely accessible. Because this pathway benefits both publishers and authors (and the authors' sponsors, who usually pay the bills), it seems likely that publishers will choose it. Because societies are in the final analysis controlled by their members, I suspect that journal publishing societies will lead the way. Why should a society refuse to offer a profit-making service that more than half of their authors want to purchase? For more on this perspective, see http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/epub/ALPSP.htm Tom Walker ======== Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology PO Box 110620 (or Natural Area Drive) University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@ufl.edu (or tjwal...@mail.ifas.ufl.edu) FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/
Re: Should Publishers Offer Free-Access Services?
I have written a paper entitled "Two societies show how to profit by providing free access" and submitted it to ALPSP's journal Learned Publishing. The manuscript is online at http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/epub/ALPSP.htm. You are encouraged to send comments to the editor of Learned Publishing, Michele Benjamin (edi...@alpsp.org), or to me (t...@ufl.edu). Tom Walker ============ Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology PO Box 110620 (or Natural Area Drive) University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@ufl.edu (or tjwal...@mail.ifas.ufl.edu) FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/
Re: Should Publishers Offer Free-Access Services?
At the recent ALPSP seminar entitled "We can't go on like this: the future of journals," I gave a talk describing in detail how two societies had profited from allowing immediate free Web access (IFWA) to articles in their journals. One of these, the Florida Entomological Society (FES), has provided IFWA to 100% of its authors since 1994. From 1994 to 2000 it provided the service without charge and suffered no significant loss of revenues from library subscriptions. For 2001, faced with a predicted sharp decline in library subscriptions, FES imposed an obligatory "IFWA fee" on all articles and scientific notes. Authors did not object to the fees, and the fees provided sufficient net revenues to completely replace net revenues from all library subscriptions. Because the predicted sharp decline in library subscriptions did not occur, FES had surplus publication revenues it did not anticipate. The new fees have not discouraged submissions. Indeed, the current issue (March 2002) is the largest on record. From 1995 until 1999, the other society, the Entomological Society of America (ESA), resisted proposals that it sell IFWA to those authors who wanted it. This resistance was in spite of the recommendations of committees of members appointed to propose what ESA should do about electronic access to its four journals. In 1999, pressure from members became irresistible, and, in January 2000, sales of IFWA began. During 2000, 25% of ESA authors bought IFWA for their articles; during 2001, 51% did so. Gross revenues from IFWA sales were $50,000. Net revenues should not have been much less, because making PDF files freely accessible on the Web costs little. My summary to this talk to publishers was "Providing your clients what they want, at a fair price, may be a good way to stay in business." The talk and notes that go with it are accessible at http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/epub/ALPSP.htm. The home page of FES's journal it at http://www.fcla.edu/FlaEnt/. The home page of ESA's journals is at http://www.entsoc.org/pubs/. Tom Walker ======== Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology PO Box 110620 (or Natural Area Drive) University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@ufl.edu (or tjwal...@mail.ifas.ufl.edu) FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/
Re: APS copyright policy
At 09:45 PM 3/4/2002 +, you wrote: On Mon, 4 Mar 2002, Thomas J. Walker wrote: > Stevan and I agree that > (1) Immediate free web access to the journal literature is optimal and > inevitable. > (2) Funding the journal literature will switch from user-pays to > author-or-author's-funder pays. > Stevan thinks of IFWA as access to PDF files. I think of it as access to > the publisher-certified version. That's fine. Nothing hinges on that distinction. I accept. > Blume's contribution to Nature's e-access forum > (http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/blume.html) > ... proposes that APS make the transition to universal free > access via institutional sponsorships, thereby avoiding the reluctance of > authors to pay submission or publication fees. Doesn't work! Free access means free access on the reader (i.e., reader-institution) end. Any institutional payment for the INCOMING literature is -- by logic, and by any definition of the word free, NOT FREE. It is then just an institutional license, which you either pay, or you don't get access. (And if it's voluntary, forget it. Economic pressures, human nature, the prisoner's dilemma, and the tragedy of the commons says institutions will opt out for a free ride.) No, the only way to make it work is to charge for what is being provided, to whom it is being provided: The service is peer review, and it is being provided to the author-institution PER OUTGOING PAPER, not to the reader-institution, per incoming journal. One is a submission fee, the other is the usual: a subscription fee. If you read Blume's last few paragraphs (http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/blume.html), you will find that the sponsorships he proposes are to make the articles free to all. He compares this type of funding to public television in the USA, where a few pay voluntarily and everyone enjoys the programs for free. Whether this model will work for APS (and others?) remains to be seen. [cut} > Should not professional societies > provide their authors (and the authors' funders) the opportunity to show if > they value free access enough to pay a fair price for it? Free access to what? We agree that they can have free access to the peer-reviewed draft by self-archiving it. Are you suggesting that they should pay the extra for the certified peer-reviewed draft? Yes. I doubt they would, but suppose they did. What would then be the next step? As outlined previously. [cut] But, as you note, we do have a choice. We can self-archive our peer-reviewed drafts for free, or we can pay to have the "certified" drafts made freely accessible, and keep paying more and more as cancellations go up. Let's see what happens! Agreed! But first publishers will have to give their authors an IFWA option. I don't expect commercial publishers to do so, but I have a hard time understanding why society publishers are so reluctant. [I think it is because they fear free access and its concomitant loss of subscription/license revenue. Do they not realize that free access is inevitable?] Tom Walker Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology PO Box 110620 (or Natural Area Drive) University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@ufl.edu (or tjwal...@mail.ifas.ufl.edu) FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/
Re: APS copyright policy
First, let me summarize: Stevan and I agree that (1) Immediate free web access to the journal literature is optimal and inevitable. (2) Funding the journal literature will switch from user-pays to author-or-author's-funder pays. I believe that (1) and (2) will be speeded if publishers will give authors the option of buying, at a fair price, immediate free web access (IFWA) to their articles. Stevan does not. I further believe that learned societies that publish journals are doing themselves and their authors a disservice by not offering IFWA to those who wish to pay a fair price for it. To their authors, because they are impeding access to the archived versions of the articles, thereby reducing the impact. To themselves, because they risk alienating their members by unnecessarily restricting access and because they are unwilling to profit from making access freer. Stevan thinks of IFWA as access to PDF files. I think of it as access to the publisher-certified version. For more on these points, see below: At 12:43 AM 3/2/2002 +, you wrote: On Fri, 1 Mar 2002, Thomas J. Walker wrote: > I agree with Stevan's interpretation that self-archiving of the > APS-formatted version is not legal. > I also agree with his conclusion that APS policy encourages self-archiving > of preprints and updates of preprints. With so much agreement between my comrade-at-arms, Tom Walker, and myself, including agreement on the optimality and inevitability of open access, how is it that we still disagree on the very same basic points that initiated this Forum in way back in September 1998? http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/.html Yet here we are, 4 years wiser, and still not of the same mind on the subject! Raising the question of this divergence in connection with the APS is still more interesting, for the APS too is of more than one mind on the matter: The APS, among all established publishers, has gone the farthest in trying to serve the interests of research and researchers. They have allowed and blessed author self-archiving of both the unrefereed preprint and the refereed postprint (i.e., the final, refereed, revised, accepted draft), and have only been ambivalent about the PDF, the APS-generated page images, worrying that if they allow authors to self-archive that too, it might do in their subscription/license revenue, and make them unable to cover their costs. That is why I picked on APS. It is sensitive to its members' desire for freer access but still seems to be denying that universal IFWA is the future. Otherwise, I could not explain why APS denies its authors a service that would be popular and profitable and could allow a smooth transition to universal free access. However, since picking on APS, I've re-read APS Editor-in-Chief Martin Blume's contribution to Nature's e-access forum (http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/Articles/blume.html) and noted that he proposes that APS make the transition to universal free access via institutional sponsorships, thereby avoiding the reluctance of authors to pay submission or publication fees. Moreover, among the costs that the collapse of subscription/license revenue would cease to be able to cover would be the costs of the editing and markup that generate the PDF itself! So it really could be quite risky to encourage authors to do that. Perhaps it is even more risky to ignore the accelerating movement toward free access and to allow subscription/license revenue to collapse with no alternative revenue source established. On the other hand, not allowing the authors to do that (but allowing them to self-archive the preprint and the postprint) allows a certain empirical, economic test to take place, one whose outcome cannot be guessed in advance: If the refereed, revised, accepted final drafts (postprints) are freely accessible online (through author/institution self-archiving of eprints), but the publisher's PDFs continue to have to be paid for, will that be enough to sustain the subscription/license market, and hence to cover all costs (including the cost of the peer review, which is about $500 per paper in the case of the APS)? I prefer a different empirical test. Should not professional societies provide their authors (and the authors' funders) the opportunity to show if they value free access enough to pay a fair price for it? (Furthermore, sales of IFWA need not equate to sales of access to PDF files. IFWA should free the access to the publisher-certified version of the refereed article. That is unlikely to remain PDF once producing paper issues is abandoned.) If the answer is yes, then the PDF and enhancements indeed represent an essential added value, as many journal publishers have been suggesting, one that those institutions that can afford it are willing to keep on paying for even when the vanilla postprints are openly accessible to all their own
Re: APS copyright policy
I agree with Stevan's interpretation that self-archiving of the APS-formatted version is not legal. I also agree with his conclusion that APS policy encourages self-archiving of preprints and updates of preprints. However, for a society that so clearly takes member interests into account, I cannot understand why APS does not allow its authors to pay a fair price to have the PDF versions of their articles freely available concurrent with paper publication. If APS wants to serve its members and the cause of free access, it should offer an immediate-free-web-access (IFWA) service. Such a service would include posting the PDF versions on arXiv and allowing authors to self-archive their APS formatted versions on any server. Offering an IFWA service would have minimal direct costs to APS, so a fair but profit-making price should not exceed 75% of the cost of 100 paper reprints (e.g., $269 x 0.75 = $202 for a 7-page article). The Entomological Society of America has offered an IFWA service for two years, and in 2001 had a gross income of $31,259 from IFWA sales. [For IFWA, ESA charges 75% of the cost of 100 paper reprints, but its prices for paper reprints are less than half those of APS. ESA gets $95 for IFWA to a 7-page article.] Here are some advantages that would accrue if APS offered an IFWA service: APS authors could have the official version of their refereed articles immediately and conveniently available to all. APS authors could avoid preparing corrigenda for their arXiv'd preprints. Users of arXiv could avoid having to combine preprints with their corrigenda [possible only if authors post corrigenda]. And of course APS would have a revenue source that would help it transition to universal free access. Tom Walker At 03:45 PM 3/1/2002 +, you wrote: On Fri, 1 Mar 2002, Thomas J. Walker wrote: > Do authors who publish in an American Physical Society journal and sign the > APS copyright transfer agreement have the legal right to post the > APS-formatted versions of their articles on their own or their department's > Web servers if these servers are OIA compliant? > http://forms.aps.org/author/copytrnsfr.asc: > (4) The right to post and update the Article on e-print servers as long as > files prepared and/or formatted by APS or its vendors are not used for that > purpose. Any such posting made or updated after acceptance of the Article > for publication shall include a link to the online abstract in the APS > journal or to the entry page of the journal. I expect that Marty Blume, Arthur Smith or Mark Doyle will be replying for APS. I just want to suggest that the APS policy as stated above is eminently reasonable, and I, for one, would consider cause of open access and the research community abundantly well-served if all journal publishers were to adopt the above policy as their model. (1) It explicitly allows both the pre-refereeing preprint and the post-refereeing postprint to be self-archived by the author/institution. This is all the BOAI self-archiving FAQ asks of publishers: "What can publishers do to facilitate self-archiving? " http://www.eprints.org/self-faq/#publishers-do (2) It requires a link to the publisher's proprietary version. (A very reasonable thing to have, for scholarly and authentication purposes.) (3) It does not allow the publisher's PDF page-images themselves to be self-archived: This is a slight inconventience, but it has an advantage too: It helps in the unbundling of essential and optional products/services that will be necessary in order to produce a stable, viable cost-recovery model in the open access era. For as long as there continues to be a market for the publisher's enhanced PDF, with its add-ons, the essential costs of peer review will continue to be covered the old way (by subscriptions/licenses from the reader-institutions that still wish to continue buying them). If/when there is no longer a market for the publisher's enhanced PDF, it will no longer be produced and sold, and the essential peer-review costs that turn the preprint into the postprint and certify the outcome can be paid for on the author-institution-end, per paper, out of the windfall savings on the prior costs of the optional reader-institution-end product. Amen. Stevan Harnad Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology PO Box 110620 (or Natural Area Drive) University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@ufl.edu (or tjwal...@mail.ifas.ufl.edu) FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/
APS copyright policy
QUESTION: Do authors who publish in an American Physical Society journal and sign the APS copyright transfer agreement have the legal right to post the APS-formatted versions of their articles on their own or their department's Web servers if these servers are OIA compliant? CONTEXT: I'm preparing a talk in which I plan to refer to APS copyright policy and want to be sure I interpret it correctly. TRANSFER AGREEMENT: Here are the relevant parts of the copyright transfer agreement from http://forms.aps.org/author/copytrnsfr.asc: The author(s) shall have the following rights:... (3) The right, after publication by APS, to use all or part of the Article without revision or modification, including the APS-formatted version, in personal compilations or other publications of the author's own works, including the author's personal web home page, and to make copies of all or part of the Article for the author's use for lecture or classroom purposes. (4) The right to post and update the Article on e-print servers as long as files prepared and/or formatted by APS or its vendors are not used for that purpose. Any such posting made or updated after acceptance of the Article for publication shall include a link to the online abstract in the APS journal or to the entry page of the journal. Tom Walker ======== Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology PO Box 110620 (or Natural Area Drive) University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@ufl.edu (or tjwal...@mail.ifas.ufl.edu) FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/
Re: Should Publishers Offer Free-Access Services?
At 03:57 PM 12/24/01 +, Stevan Harnad wrote: >On Mon, 24 Dec 2001, Thomas J. Walker wrote: > >> It is easy to understand why commercially published journals do not offer >> their authors the service, but it is not at all clear why society-published >> journals do not. The members of the societies would approve, and the >> society's journals would gain in value because their authors would gain in >> impact. > >Nevertheless, it is a fact that almost no journal yet offers it! > True, and this puzzles me in the case of society-published journals. >But even if they did, it is not at all clear whether paying the >price would be more attractive to researchers than just self-archiving >it for themselves. The effort is in reality minimal (a few minutes). > They might well do both. As far as how many would pay for publisher-assisted immediate free Web access, it would depend on the price and how convenient it made the free access. >It is more likely that the reason researchers are not yet taking either >path in sufficient numbers is that they simply have not thought it >through yet. As you noted above, the paths are not equally available. All researchers can self-archive. What per cent do? Only Entomological Society of America authors can pay extra for publisher-assisted immediate free Web access. For articles in the Nov/Dec issues of the four ESA journals, 61% of authors paid the fee (64 of 105). (http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/epub/esaepub.htm) [Is it true that only ESA sells immediate free Web access to their authors? If not, what other publishers offer the service and at what price and with sales to what per cent of authors?] Tom Walker ============ Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology and Nematology University of FloridaE-mail: t...@ufl.edu PO Box 110620 FAX: 352-392-0190 Gainesville FL 32611-0620 Phone: 352-392-1901 ext. 125 Homepage: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/ =
Re: Should Publishers Offer Free-Access Services?
[See below for the context of this posting.] The current problem with the self-archiving of refereed articles is that it requires some effort on the part of the researcher and produces little benefit. Therefore, few researchers do it. On the other hand, many researchers will pay a fair price for immediate free Web access to their articles, and the more convenient the access is made, the more the researchers will value the service. It is easy to understand why commercially published journals do not offer their authors the service, but it is not at all clear why society-published journals do not. The members of the societies would approve, and the society's journals would gain in value because their authors would gain in impact. Tom Walker At 12:51 PM 12/24/2001 +, Stevan Harnad wrote: On Sun, 23 Dec 2001, Thomas J. Walker wrote: > >PhysNet for the EPS: http://physnet.uni-oldenburg.de/PhysNet > > ...PhysNet is designed to make it easy to (among other > things) harvest what is on the home pages of members of physics > institutions... > ... > I then tested (2) with this sample of three papers and failed to find any > of the papers by using PhysNet--either by searching for the papers directly > or by using PhysNet to go directly to the authors' home pages. > ... > Although I failed to find any of the papers with PhysNet, I quickly found > two with Google (http://www.google.com). Google displayed a URL for the > PDF file of the third paper as well, but it was no longer the correct one. To draw any conclusions from this, it is necessary to put it into context. I will do this in a moment, but first let me point out some remarkable and highly relevant new resources under development by Xiaoming Liu at Old Dominion University: (1) ARC http://arc.cs.odu.edu/ a cross-archive harvester for OAI-compliant Eprint Archives and (2) DP9 http://arc.cs.odu.edu:8080/dp9/index.jsp an OAI gateway service for web crawlers. Now the context: We must distinguish between actual services that are available right now, and services that could readily be built once more of the full-text refereed literature is available in OAI-compliant Eprints Archives to build those services on top of and to apply them to. ARC, DP9, and CITE-BASE http://citebase.eprints.org/cgi-bin/search are examples of such services, already within reach and under development. It is in this light that the alternative strategies for increasing the free-access full-text content should be weighed, for otherwise our judgment is biassed by the undeniable but readily remediable (and one hopes temporary) fact that there is as yet still so little full-text refereed-article content archived and freely accessible on-line. The alternatives that we are weighing concern how to accelerate the free accessibility of more and more of that full-text content. Spawning the requisite services on top of the content is NOT the problem. Harnad, S. (2001) Six Proposals for Freeing the Refereed Literature Ariadne 28 June 2001. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue28/minotaur/#1 http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/ariadne.htm Stevan Harnad NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing free access to the refereed journal literature online is available at the American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99 & 00 & 01): http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html or http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html You may join the list at the amsci site. Discussion can be posted to: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology PO Box 110620 (or Natural Area Drive) University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@ufl.edu (or tjwal...@mail.ifas.ufl.edu) FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/
Re: Should Publishers Offer Free-Access Services?
At 11:17 AM 12/23/01 +, Eberhard R. Hilf wrote: > >did you check our services? >PhysNet for the EPS: http://physnet.uni-oldenburg.de/PhysNet > No, I diddn't but I have now. When I found that PhysNet is designed to make it easy to (among other things) harvest what is on the home pages of members of physics institutions, I concluded that APS might find no market for the service I had thought it should offer--namely, of posting authors' APS-formatted papers on arXve. This no-market scenario would be true if (1) Physicists that publish papers in APS journals post the PDF files of those papers on their home pages and do so in a timely fashion. (2) Papers so posted are as easily found through PhysNet (or very nearly so) as they would be on arXve. The test of (1) would be to go to recent issues of APS publications, find the home pages of a sample of authors, and see if they had posted the PDF files of their papers. I'll leave that test to APS market research; however, I went to the faculty list of University of Florida's Physics Department (http://www.phys.ufl.edu/faculty/faculty.html) and browsed a sample of their home pages for PDF files of their papers. A minority of UF physics faculty listed their publications on their home pages and a minority of these had links to the full texts of their papers. Nonetheless, I soon found three that had posted a PDF file of a recent article and two of these had posted APS-formatted files. I then tested (2) with this sample of three papers and failed to find any of the papers by using PhysNet--either by searching for the papers directly or by using PhysNet to go directly to the authors' home pages. Thus APS may have a market after all. A substantial portion of physicists who publish in APS journals may be willing to pay APS a fair price to facilitate free access to their APS-formatted papers and to relieve them of having to update their home pages with bibliographic entries and links each time they publish. Postscript: Although I failed to find any of the papers with PhysNet, I quickly found two with Google (http://www.google.com). Google displayed a URL for the PDF file of the third paper as well, but it was no longer the correct one. Below are the three papers, their URLs, and the search string [in brackets] that I used to find it in Google. S. G. Bompadre, Arthur F. Hebard, Valeri N. Kotov, Donavan Hall, G. Maris, J. Baas, and T. T. M. Palstra. 2000. Spin-Peierls transition in NaV2O5 in high magnetic fields. Physical Review B 61(20) R13321. http://www.phys.ufl.edu/~afh/nav2o5.pdf [hebard "spin-peierls transition"] C. Wexler and Alan T. Dorsey. 2001. Disclination unbinding transition in quantum Hall liquid crystals. Physical Review B 64(11) 115312. http://www.phys.ufl.edu/~dorsey/papers/prb64_115312.pdf [dorsey "disclination unbinding transition"] S.J. Hagen, C.W. Carswell, and E.M. Sjolander. 2001. Rate of intrachain contact formation in an unfolded protein: temperature and denaturant effects. Journal of Molecular Biology 305:1161-1171. http://www.phys.ufl.edu/~hagen/pubs/jmb_2001.pdf [hagen "rate of intrachain contact"] [Google returned the dead link http://www.phys.ufl.edu/~hagen/jmb_2001.pdf for this paper] Tom Walker ============ Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology and Nematology University of FloridaE-mail: t...@ufl.edu PO Box 110620 FAX: 352-392-0190 Gainesville FL 32611-0620 Phone: 352-392-1901 ext. 125 Homepage: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/ =
Re: Should Publishers Offer Free-Access Services?
Stevan-- I see that you have changed the name of "Why not offer a valuable service?", a thread I recently started. The new name you chose is not descriptive of what I'd like discussed, which is why don't publishers offer free access services that their authors want so long as they can make a profit by doing so. If you must rename the thread, how about "Should publishers offer free-access services?" [Done. -- SH] The service I suggested for APS was posting the APS-formatted versions of articles on arXiv. In the case of Entomological Society of America [ESA], the bundle of services it sells for a single fee (75% of the cost of 100 paper reprints) includes: (1) no restraints on authors' use of the PDF files of their ESA-formatted articles, including posting them on any server they please (something that APS does not allow) (2) posting the files on ESA's server at a location where they are easily found and freely accessible (http://www.entsoc.org). Something that it may soon include but does not yet is: (3) making the articles immediately accessible via PubMed Central. [More than a year ago ESA and PubMed Central agreed to this, but implementation has not been easy.] I am lobbying for yet another service that would add to the value of the bundle: (4) insuring that the full-text of articles are hot-linked to the records in ISI's Current Contents Connect and Web of Science. Even with only (1) and (2) in effect, more than 60% of ESA's authors choose to buy the bundle. Tom At 08:24 PM 12/21/2001 +, you wrote: >At 02:06 AM 12/21/2001 +, Stevan Harnad wrote: > > >On Thu, 20 Dec 2001, Thomas J. Walker wrote: > > > > > The University of Florida has no OAI-compliant University Eprint > > > Archives and my attempts to interest the Director of Libraries in > > > starting one have so far been unsuccessful. > > > > > > Perhaps it is not too late for APS and some of its authors to benefit > from > > > the service I described. > > > >Well, I shall have to leave it to the university community's > >judgment whether, in the short- and long-term interest of > > > >(1) maximizing other universities' access to their outgoing research, > >(2) maximixing the impact of their outgoing research, > >(3) maximizing their access to other universities' outgoing research, > > and perhaps eventually also > >(3) relieving their serials crisis > > > >the university library and administration elect to do: > > > >(a) nothing, > >(b) create and fill university Eprint Archives for their outgoing > > research, > >(c) pay journals to do the equivalent for them. > > > >My guess is that by far the cheapest, fastest, most productive, and > >most general option would be (b). And a growing number of universities > >seem to be coming to this conclusion too (that UFL is not yet one of > >them may not be the decisive datum) > >I am continually disappointed that administrators of granting agencies, >scientific societies, and universities fail to take simple steps that would >lead rapidly to free access to journal literature. Therefore, my guess is >that they will mostly continue to do (a) [nothing]. > >Therefore, researchers, who are the ones most hurt by suboptimal access to >their articles, should encourage their universities to do (b) _and_ their >societies to permit (c). > >To generalize on the question I asked relative to APS, why do not >scientific societies offer their authors a service that all would want and >for which many would pay a profit-making price? > >Thomas J. Walker >Department of Entomology & Nematology >PO Box 110620 (or Natural Area Drive) >University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 >E-mail: t...@ufl.edu (or tjwal...@mail.ifas.ufl.edu) >FAX: (352)392-0190 >Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/ > Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology PO Box 110620 (or Natural Area Drive) University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@ufl.edu (or tjwal...@mail.ifas.ufl.edu) FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/
Re: Should Publishers Offer Free-Access Services?
At 02:06 AM 12/21/2001 +, Stevan Harnad wrote: >On Thu, 20 Dec 2001, Thomas J. Walker wrote: > > > The University of Florida has no OAI-compliant University Eprint > > Archives and my attempts to interest the Director of Libraries in > > starting one have so far been unsuccessful. > > > > Perhaps it is not too late for APS and some of its authors to benefit from > > the service I described. > >Well, I shall have to leave it to the university community's >judgment whether, in the short- and long-term interest of > >(1) maximizing other universities' access to their outgoing research, >(2) maximixing the impact of their outgoing research, >(3) maximizing their access to other universities' outgoing research, > and perhaps eventually also >(3) relieving their serials crisis > >the university library and administration elect to do: > >(a) nothing, >(b) create and fill university Eprint Archives for their outgoing > research, >(c) pay journals to do the equivalent for them. > >My guess is that by far the cheapest, fastest, most productive, and >most general option would be (b). And a growing number of universities >seem to be coming to this conclusion too (that UFL is not yet one of >them may not be the decisive datum) I am continually disappointed that administrators of granting agencies, scientific societies, and universities fail to take simple steps that would lead rapidly to free access to journal literature. Therefore, my guess is that they will mostly continue to do (a) [nothing]. Therefore, researchers, who are the ones most hurt by suboptimal access to their articles, should encourage their universities to do (b) _and_ their societies to permit (c). To generalize on the question I asked relative to APS, why do not scientific societies offer their authors a service that all would want and for which many would pay a profit-making price? Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology PO Box 110620 (or Natural Area Drive) University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@ufl.edu (or tjwal...@mail.ifas.ufl.edu) FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/
Re: Should Publishers Offer Free-Access Services?
At 07:06 PM 12/20/2001 +, you wrote: On Thu, 20 Dec 2001, Thomas J. Walker wrote: > Why hasn't APS offered its authors, at a fair price... > the service of posting an > author's APS-formatted article on arXiv?... > > [Authors can already post the APS-formatted version on their own home > pages, but as Andrew Odlyzko has documented, _any_ impediment to access > reduces the use of information... With the advent of OAI-compliant University Eprint Archives http://www.arl.org/sparc/pubs/enews/aug01.html#6 it no longer makes any difference whatsoever, in terms of visibility or access, and hence usage and impact, whether authors self-archive in a central disciplinary Eprint Archive, like ArXiv or CogPrints, or in their own institutional "home" Eprint Archives. Thanks to OAI-compliance, all the papers in all those archives are interoperable, hence harvestable into single global "virtual archives" such as ARC http://arc.cs.odu.edu/ or http://citebase.eprints.org/cgi-bin/search University of Florida has a large (about 50 faculty and 100 graduate students) and active physics department (http://www.phys.ufl.edu/). To illustrate, it received $1.3 million from the National Science Foundation and additional funding from the State for its Microkelvin Research Laboratory, which studies quantum phenomena at ultralow temperatures. The University of Florida has no OAI-compliant University Eprint Archives and my attempts to interest the Director of Libraries in starting one have so far been unsuccessful. Perhaps it is not too late for APS and some of its authors to benefit from the service I described. Tom ======== Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology PO Box 110620 (or Natural Area Drive) University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@ufl.edu (or tjwal...@mail.ifas.ufl.edu) FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/
Re: Should Publishers Offer Free-Access Services?
The exchange copied at the end of this posting prompted me to ask this question: Why hasn't APS offered its authors, at a fair price, a valuable service that all would want and many would buy--namely, the service of posting an author's APS-formatted article on arXiv? [Currently authors sign a copyright agreement that denies them the right to do this themselves.] The advantage to the authors would be that the paper-archived version of their refereed articles would be on arXiv, and they (the authors) would be relieved of the bother of having to prepare and post their own less-attractive and less-authentic versions of their final paper if they wanted users of arXiv to directly access it. [Authors can already post the APS-formatted version on their own home pages, but as Andrew Odlyzko has documented, _any_ impediment to access reduces the use of information (The Rapid Evolution of Scholarly Communication http://www.catchword.com/alpsp/09531513/v15n1/contp1-1.htm), and, as Stevan continually reminds us, attention to their articles is what authors of the journal literature want.] The advantage to APS would be that it would be making money from providing a service for which many authors would be willing to pay a fair price. (Currently a fair price should be quite low; Entomological Society of America [ESA] prices a similar service for 75% the price of 100 reprints.) That such a service might be popular is suggested by these data: for the latest issues of two of ESA's journals (Environmental Entomology and Journal of Economic Entomology), 64% of authors thought it worthwhile to pay for immediate free Web access to their refereed, ESA-formatted articles (http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/epub/ESAepub.htm). [If ESA succeeds in having its immediate-free-access articles immediately accessible through PubMed Central, its service will become even more comparable to what is suggested above for APS .] If APS has not yet asked its members whether they favor or oppose APS offering the service described above, perhaps it should. Tom Walker At 07:59 PM 12/19/2001 +, you wrote: On Tue, 18 Dec 2001 Arthur P. Smith wrote: > if publishing free literature really involved no copy-editing, we would > likely never do it, as a publisher with a historical interest in certain > publication standards Just my opinion, really... > The society has stated goals to "advance and diffuse the knowledge > of physics" which is more about publishing quality "content" than > "doing peer review". We [APS] manage the peer review as part of > publishing journals of course, that's how we determine what's worth > putting in our journals. But if the journals ceased to really mean > anything in terms of improved presentation of the content, I > suspect we would just sell the business to whoever wanted it; > Elsevier probably. It's my opinion that in this case Arthur's opinion does not represent the APS (Marty?)... It think that if the Physics community should ever decide that all it wants/needs is peer review, APS will then faithfully provide that, rather than ceding the titles... In any case, the extent to which copy-editing is worth paying for, over and above peer review, is surely something the market could decide, once the online access to the peer-reviewed draft was free. (APS is generously freeing access even to its proprietary, copy-edited drafts, by allowing its authors to self-archive them, although this rather moots the market decision! http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/APS/copy_trnsfr.pdf ) Stevan Harnad Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology PO Box 110620 (or Natural Area Drive) University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@ufl.edu (or tjwal...@mail.ifas.ufl.edu) FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/
Re: Interview with Elsevier Science
Hi Richard-- [I couldn't get your e-mail address to work, so I'm sending this to the list.] I hope you will ask if Elsevier has plans to allow authors in their journals to purchase immediate, free, Web access to their articles. In other words will Elsevier do what the Entomological Society of America has already done and sell authors immediate toll-free posting of their articles. Ent. Soc. Am. makes money from these sales and authors get what they most desire (free Web access to their research results by anyone who wishes it [=maximum impact]). Such sales also provide a market-driven means to transition from the present subscription-supported system of journal publication to one in which publication is supported by authors and their sponsors. Because the total cost of the latter system is lower than the current system and because all the stakeholders other than the publishers clearly benefit from it, how does Elsevier propose to prevent it? For information on the Ent Soc Am initiative go to http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/epub/esaepub.htm. For more on the economics of free access, see http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/epub/FWApage.htm. Tom ======== Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology PO Box 110620 (or Natural Area Drive) University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@ufl.edu (or tjwal...@mail.ifas.ufl.edu) FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/
Public Library of Science discussion
Some of you may be interested in listening to this Web-accessible panel discussion of the PLS initiative: On Friday afternoon 6/22, NPR's "Science Friday" devoted an hour to the Public Library of Science initiative. Host Ira Flatow's guests were Harold Varmus, former director of the NIH and now President of Memorial-Sloan Kettering in NY; Ann Okerson (liblicense-l moderator), Associate University Librarian at Yale; and Karen Hunter, Senior VP of Elsevier. The archived realaudio version of the program can be found at: http://www.npr.org/ramfiles/totn/20010622.totn.02.rmm Tom W. ============ Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology PO Box 110620 (or Natural Area Drive) University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@ufl.edu FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/tjwbib/walker.htm
Re: PostGutenberg Copyrights and Wrongs for Give-Away Research
At 11:38 AM 6/22/2001 +0100, Stevan wrote: The American Physical Society version of this same basic arrangement is at ftp://aps.org/pub/jrnls/copy_trnsfr.asc : "The author(s) shall have the following rights: The author(s) agree that all copies of the Article made under any of these following rights shall include notice of the APS copyright... (3) The right, after publication by APS, to use all or part of the Article without revision or modification, including the APS-formatted version, in personal compilations or other publications of the author's own works, including the author's personal web home page, and to make copies of all or part of the Article for the author's use for lecture or classroom purposes. (4) The right to post and update the Article on e-print servers as long as files prepared and/or formatted by APS or its vendors are not used for that purpose. Any such posting made or updated after acceptance of the Article for publication shall include a link to the online abstract in the APS journal or to the entry page of the journal. [I might add only that the distinction between "personal web home page" and "e-print servers" is silly, incoherent, and hence untenable, but it makes no difference, if it makes some people happy to put it that way...] There is distinction that to many authors may be important: E-print servers that are well stocked are a somewhat more convenient place to look for particular articles compared to hunting down the authors' home pages and looking there. Of greater consequence, researchers who are not looking for articles by the authors in question may find articles by them on that well-stocked e-print server, like them, and use them. It would be interesting and possibly profit-making if APS would give their authors the opportunity to pay a fair price for APS putting their fully formatted articles on arXive.org. It would also give APS a source of revenue should their subscriptions falter. Tom W. ======== Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology PO Box 110620 (or Natural Area Drive) University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@ufl.edu FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/tjwbib/walker.htm
Re: The Six Roads to Liberating the Refereed Literature
The first-listed of Stevan's six roads can be described as authors paying publishers to permanently and immediately give toll-free access to at least the PDF version of their articles. These are the three "minuses" he notes for that road. (1) Most journals don't offer it. Now that ESA has shown that it is popular and profit-making, other society-published journals should soon offer it. After all, members (ultimately) govern their scientific societies, and most members will surely want their societies to offer the service. (2) There will always be authors who can't afford it. There will always be researchers who don't have as much money as they need to do the research they would like to do. The current costs of journal publication are minor compared to other costs of research. In the all-e future, the cost of refereed publication will be lower still. Furthermore, societies sometimes subsidize the publication of articles by members who have no institutional support, and they may choose to continue this practice. (3) Self-archiving their own eprints accomplishes the same outcome, immediately for everyone, at no expense to authors. NOT the same outcome: Except in physics and some related disciplines, researchers seldom search e-print archives to keep current with the journal literature (too few papers are currently archived). NOT immediately for everyone: The most efficient way to find new literature is to use current awareness services, such as Current Contents Connect. These services will soon hotlink to articles on publishers' web sites. If users of such a service can immediately access, without charge, the full text of some of the articles they find, the authors of those articles will benefit more than authors of access-restricted articles who have posted eprints. Similarly, when PubMed Central starts indexing many articles, only the authors of articles that publishers have posted will benefit (according to present plans). NOT at no expense to authors: Some time and worry is involved. Time, because making a postprint attractive and the changes easily understood may require an hour or so that could otherwise be spent on more research. Worry, because some authors fret about the legality of postprints. Stevan's first minus is the only one of consequence. When other societies start to offer the service, the move toward toll-free access will accelerate. Tom Walker At 04:15 PM 6/1/2001 +0100, you wrote: On Fri, 1 Jun 2001, Thomas J. Walker wrote: > I am for any strategy that speeds the transition to free access, but both > [1] boycotts to force publishers to change and [2] self-archiving make > authors and their publishers adversaries. In offering a service that > authors want, at a fair price, ESA is demonstrating that the change > to free access can be mutually beneficial and market-driven. > I look forward to other societies soon offering this service that their > authors/members want. Any path that gets us all to our shared goal of free online access to the entire refereed corpus for everyone (and as soon as possible) is welcome; and multiple paths (if they don't impede one another) are welcome too. You are right that both boycotts and self-archiving are at odds with the preferences of publishers (though I think "adversaries" may be overstating it, at least in the case of self-archiving: 150,000 papers have already been archived in physics with the cooperation, rather than the opposition, of the American Physical Society, the publisher of the highest-quality journals in the field). Here, as I see it, are the plusses and minusses of the six main strategies for freeing the refereed literature: (1) Paying the publisher for publisher-supplied online-offprints (o-prints, free for all): A good solution where it is available, and where the author can afford to pay for it, but (i) most journals don't offer it, (ii) there will always be authors who cannot afford to pay for it, and (iii) self-archiving their own eprint accomplishes the same outcome, immediately, for everyone, at no expense to authors. In short, for-fee o-prints require authors to pay for something they can already do for free (as the authors of the 150,000 physics papers have done). (2) Boycotting journals that do not give away their contents online for free requires authors to give up their established journals of choice and to switch to unestablished journals (if they exist), not on the basis of their quality or impact, but on the basis of their give-away policy. If authors self-archived their papers, they could keep publishing in their established journals of choice yet still ensure free access for all. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/nature3.htm (3) Library consortial support (e.g. SPARC) for lower-priced journals lowers the access barriers, but does not eliminate them (and merely entrenches fee-based access blockag
Re: Should Publishers Offer Free-Access Services?
Researchers publishing in the four principal journals of the Entomological Society of America (ESA) have embraced the opportunity to pay for immediate, permanent, toll-free access to the PDF files of their published articles. The price is currently 75% of the price of 100 paper reprints, which were, in the past, bought by more than 90% of ESA authors (and which are a notably poorer value). For the March and April issues of the four journals, authors paid for immediate free Web access to 59% of the articles--up from 42% in January and February and 24% for all of 2000. I am for any strategy that speeds the transition to free access, but both boycotts to force publishers to change and self-archiving make authors and their publishers adversaries. In offering a service that authors want, at a fair price, ESA is demonstrating that the change to free access can be mutually beneficial and market-driven. I look forward to other societies soon offering this service that their authors/members want. For more on a market-driven transition to free access, see http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/fewww/tjwonwww.htm. Tom Walker Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology PO Box 110620 (or Natural Area Drive) University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@ufl.edu FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/tjwbib/walker.htm
Thoughts prompted by the PLS initiative
Scientific American has a four-page Web article prompted by the Public Library of Science initiative at http://www.sciam.com/explorations/2001/042301publish/. It is entitled "Publish Free or Perish." An interesting critique of the Science editors' response to the Public Library of Science initiative is at http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org/plosScience.htm. I suspect that as more journal articles become conveniently accessible, without tolls, six months to a year after publication, authors of journal articles will become increasingly willing to pay a fair price for _immediate_ free web access (IFWA). The Entomological Society of America is currently the only publisher that offers its authors this opportunity. For the first two months of 2001, 44% of the authors of articles in ESA's four principal journals paid for IFWA. For the March issue of its Journal of Medical Entomology, 53% of authors paid. ESA is making money and their authors are being allowed to buy something they want. Will authors in other society-published journals have to lobby their governing boards before being offered convenient IFWA at a fair price? ESA's publications are at http://www.entsoc.org/pubs/. I've posted an 800-word commentary on "Market-driven free access to journal articles" at http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/fewww/tjwonwww.htm. Tom Walker ============ Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology PO Box 110620 (or Natural Area Drive) University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@ufl.edu FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/tjwbib/walker.htm
Re: Should Publishers Offer Free-Access Services?
cieties in those areas to
lobby for their societies to offer IFWA at a price no greater than 100
paper reprints. Because the societies as well as their authors would
benefit from such sales, their leaders should have no basis for refusing to
initiate such sales.
Andrew Olyzko has recently pointed out that growth rates rather than
absolute numbers are the best indicators of the e-publication future ("The
rapid evolution of scholarly communication" at
http://www.research.att.com/~amo/doc/eworld.html). On this basis, sales of
IFWA may be more important in the transition to universal free access than
many have previously thought.
Tom Walker
=
Thomas J. Walker
Department of Entomology & Nematology
University of Florida, PO Box 110620, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620
E-mail: t...@gnv.ifas.ufl.edu FAX: (352)392-0190
Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/tjwbib/walker.htm
=
Re: Free Online Access After One Year?
At 10:44 AM 9/27/00 +0100, you wrote: On Wed, 27 Sep 2000, Richard Gordon wrote: > I understand your arguments on making online access to the scientific > literature free. However, I'd like to suggest a compromise, which > some publishers might be willing to implement right away: > > All online journal articles will become accessible for free at a > fixed interval after publication. > > A reasonable interval might be one year. Few sales of printed > journals occur after a year, so only those people needing rapid > access (and not willing to do the work of writing for reprints or > accessing preprint depositories) would pay. I'm not sure in what sense you suggest this as a compromise. If what you mean is that it would be very helpful if journal publishers freed their contents on their own websites a year after publication, then of course it certainly would be very helpful (and indeed a number of journal publishers are contemplating doing so already, and even earlier). Seventy-two of the journals that publish the e-version of their journals through HighWire Press are already doing this, in most cases after 1 yr. http://highwire.stanford.edu/lists/freeart.dtl For those who are not content with just the self-archived "vanilla" version of the refereed report, and are willing and able to pay (or wait) for the publisher's "deluxe" version, let that be available as an OPTION for as long as there is a market for it (whether it is a year from publication or even longer). But certainly no "compromise" should be considered that entails continuing to needlessly holding the refereed reports hostage to the deluxe add-ons and their tolls -- not even for a minute. (The immediate availability of their refereed research is as important to researchers as the immediate availability of their funds is to investors: an "embargo" of even a day amounts to a pure, and gratuitous, loss.) The free Web access to their articles after 1 year (or more, or less) will whet the appetites of authors and their sponsors for _immediate_ free Web access, with the same convenience to the authors, with the same well-known place of access, and in the archived format (currently paper). This will create a demand from authors and their sponsors that publishers provide this service (IFWA) at a fair price. Currently a fair price, as demonstrated by the Entomological Society of America, is no more than 75% of the price of 100 paper reprints. Should this scenario prove true, publishers (at least society ones) and their authors may smoothly transition to what Stevan and I agree is inevitable. ===== Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology University of Florida, PO Box 110620, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@gnv.ifas.ufl.edu FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/tjwbib/walker.htm =
Re: Should Publishers Offer Free-Access Services?
IIn an earlier posting, I explained how the transition to universal free
access to journal articles could become market-driven if publishers would
only sell Immediate Free Web Access (IFWA) to authors who want it. The
publishers would deliver IFWA by posting freely accessible PDF files of
articles concurrent with publication. The price of this service would be
very low at first, but would increase as paper copies on library shelves
(and site licenses to electronic versions) became superfluous. Publishers
would replace revenues from libraries with revenues from authors and their
supporting institutions, but only to the extent that authors and their
institutions wanted this to happen. (See "An IFWA transition" in the
archives of this forum at
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html.
See also
http://www.fcla.edu/FlaEnt/bioscivp.htm.)
Later I reported that the Entomological Society of America (ESA) was
offering IFWA to its authors for 75% of the cost of 100 paper reprints.
. (See "Should Publishers Offer Free-Access Services?" at
http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html.)
Here I report that the initial results of selling IFWA suggest that the
transition to universal free access may indeed be speeded and smoothed by
such sales.
First some background: ESA, like many other scientific societies, partly
depends on revenues from its journals to pay for other member
services. Because of this, and because publishing high-quality refereed
journals is expensive, ESA has been reluctant to provide free Web access to
the articles in its journals. For example, in 1997, when ESA began to
offer its authors "PDF reprints," it chose to sell them by the download and
to charge the same price for downloads as for traditional reprints. [PDF
reprints were created by making PDF files of the articles and posting the
files on ESA's server with a counter to track the number of times the files
were downloaded.] In 1998, ESA sold PDF reprints for 8% of the 690
articles published in its four principal journals. In 1999, sales dropped
to 5% of 618 articles. Evidently, most authors did not think that
counter-limited PDF reprints were worth the price that ESA was charging.
In December 1999, ESA's Governing Board voted to sell IFWA in the form of
"unlimited PDF reprints" and set the price for that service at 75% of the
price of 100 paper reprints. For example, for $90, the PDF file of a
7-page article would be immediately freely available on the Web and could
be downloaded without limits. Furthermore the author could post the PDF
file of the article on any server and could print copies of the articles
from the PDF file to satisfy needs for paper reprints. During the first
six months (Jan. to June), authors bought IFWA for 14% of the articles
published in the society's four journals [58 of 405 articles]. During July
and August 2000 (the most recent bimonthly issues), authors bought IFWA for
35% of the articles (44 of 127). This rapid increase in the sale of
unlimited free electronic access to articles suggests that ESA's authors
consider the current price a fair one.
Previous sales of paper reprints suggest why unlimited PDF reprints are
selling well. More than 90% of ESA authors have traditionally bought at
least 100 paper reprints of their articles. ESA authors who are willing to
forego "official" reprints can save money. Authors who don't buy paper
reprints can print near equivalents from the freely accessible PDF files
and can avoid storing paper reprints and fulfilling reprint requests by
mail. [Currently about 60% of those who buy IFWA buy paper reprints as
well, but I predict that such purchases will quickly decline.]
As far as I can determine, high rates of purchase of paper reprints are
characteristic of all journals in the biological and biomedical
sciences. Therefore, I would expect members of societies in those areas to
lobby for their societies to offer IFWA at a price no greater than 100
paper reprints. Because the societies as well as their authors would
benefit from such sales, their leaders should have no basis for refusing to
initiate such sales.
Andrew Olyzko has recently pointed out that growth rates rather than
absolute numbers are the best indicators of the e-publication future ("The
rapid evolution of scholarly communication" at
http://www.research.att.com/~amo/doc/eworld.html). On this basis, sales of
IFWA may be more important in the transition to universal free access than
many have previously thought.
Tom Walker
=
Thomas J. Walker
Department of Entomology & Nematology
University of Florida, PO Box 110620, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620
E-mail: t...@gnv.ifas.ufl.edu FAX: (352)392-0190
Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/tjwbib/walker.htm
=
Effect of free access on subscription revenues
I have long thought that scientific societies should allow immediate free Web access (IFWA) to the articles in their journals so long as they could do so without negative fiscal consequences. Here I report that revenues from library subscriptions to Florida Entomologist have _increased_, even though the Florida Entomological Society (FES) has facilitated immediate free Internet access to its contents since 1994. First some background: In May 1993, FES decided to experiment with free Internet access to its long-published (1917-) refereed journal. In November 1994, with the advent of the free Acrobat reader, FES succeeded in posting a current issue on Gopher. Because its authors and members liked free access and because providing it cost very little, FES continued its free Internet offerings and enhanced them (http://www.fcla.edu/FlaEnt/). It also carefully monitored library subscriptions to Florida Entomologist, in case lose of library revenues would force FES to charge for its new service. [FES expects its journal to pay for itself, but does not require that journal revenues subsidize other member services.] Library subscriptions to Florida Entomologist declined a total of 4.9% from 1994 to 2000. That may be well below average for scientific journals. It is indeed less than the decline in library subscriptions for the four principal journals of the Entomological Society of America (ESA), which dropped a total of 21.9% from 1994 to 1999. (Until this year, ESA made none of its articles freely Web accessible.) Revenues from library subscriptions to Florida Entomologist did not decline between 1994 and 2000 because FES increased the price of library subscriptions by 25% (from $40 to $50). The revenue enhancing effect of this increase was mostly negated by a 16% increase in the Consumer Price Index. Nonetheless, in constant dollars, FES's revenues from library subscriptions were 2.5% greater in 2000 than in 1994. Libraries are apparently reluctant to drop journals to which they have long subscribed. Therefore scientific societies can give away IFWA and not risk sharp declines in library subscriptions. With even less risk, scientific societies can sell IFWA at a very attractive price to those authors who want it--and make money by doing so. Tom Walker = Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology University of Florida, PO Box 110620, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@gnv.ifas.ufl.edu FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/tjwbib/walker.htm =
Re: Incentives
At 11:21 AM 8/30/00 -0400, Peter Singer wrote: In response to the critiques of my original post, I have published an article on freedom of information and incentives. I argue that the literature will only be truly free when incentives in science are designed to reward rather than penalize open access publication. I agree that researchers need more incentive to make their articles freely accessible on the Web. Otherwise they would already be self-archiving. Where this incentive is likely to come from is documented in a recent essay by Andrew Odlyzko (http://www.si.umich.edu/PEAK-2000/odlyzko.pdf). As Odlyzko concludes, "The realization will spread that anything not easily available on the Web will be almost invisible. ...ease of access will be seen as vital." Tom Walker ===== Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology University of Florida, PO Box 110620, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@gnv.ifas.ufl.edu FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/tjwbib/walker.htm =
Re: Should Publishers Offer Free-Access Services?
At 04:59 PM 5/7/00 +0100, Martin Blume wrote: >>On Fri, 5 May 2000, Thomas J. Walker wrote: >> >> > The APS does not seem to allow the posting of its PDF files (which are >> > equivalent to the archived version of the articles): >> > >> > "The author(s) shall have the following rights: >> > >> > (4) The right to post and update the article on e-print servers as long as >> > files prepared and/or formatted by APS or its vendors are not used for >> > that purpose, and as long as access to the server does not depend on >> > payment of access, subscription, or membership fees. Any such posting >> > made or updated after acceptance of the article for publication shall >> > include a copyright notice as in (3)." >> > >> > [from ftp://aps.org/pub/jrnls/copy_trnsfr.asc] > >The section of the APS copyright form immediately preceding the above gives >authors the right to post the APS formatted version (PDF files) on their >own web page - providing electronic reprints for the authors without charge: > >"(3) The right, after publication by APS, to use all or part of the article > and abstract, without revision or modification, in personal compilations > or other publications of the author's own works, including the author's > personal web home page, and to make copies of all or part of such > materials for the author's use for lecture or classroom purposes, > provided that the first page of such use or copy prominently displays > the bibliographic data and the following copyright notice: > ``Copyright (year) by The American Physical Society.'' " > Thanks for the correction. Entomological Society of American electronic reprints differ from APS electronic reprints in three respects: (1) the authors pay a fee (75% the price of 100 paper reprints), (2) ESA makes them freely available on its server, and (3) ESA allows authors to post them anywhere, including e-print servers. ESA hopes, in the near future, to post its e-reprints on PubMed Central and to get major literature indexing services to link directly to them. Tom Walker = Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology University of Florida, PO Box 110620, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@gnv.ifas.ufl.edu FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/tjwbib/walker.htm =
Re: Should Publishers Offer Free-Access Services?
At 04:52 PM 5/5/00 +0100, Steve Harnad wrote (in part): > >Open self-archiving requires no "facilitating." And NO price is fair >for something one can have for free. The APS (American Physical Society) >already "facilitates" self-archiving simply by explicitly ALLOWING it; >and the 128,000 self-archived papers in arXiv.org to date attest to its >timeliness and utility: > >http://arXiv.org/cgi-bin/show_monthly_submissions >http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/help/copyright.html >ftp://aps.org/pub/jrnls/copy_trnsfr.asc > The APS does not seem to allow the posting of its PDF files (which are equivalent to the archived version of the articles): "The author(s) shall have the following rights: (4) The right to post and update the article on e-print servers as long as files prepared and/or formatted by APS or its vendors are not used for that purpose, and as long as access to the server does not depend on payment of access, subscription, or membership fees. Any such posting made or updated after acceptance of the article for publication shall include a copyright notice as in (3)." [from ftp://aps.org/pub/jrnls/copy_trnsfr.asc] Tom ============= Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology University of Florida, PO Box 110620, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@gnv.ifas.ufl.edu FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/tjwbib/walker.htm =
Re: Should Publishers Offer Free-Access Services?
Here is an item from the April 2000 Newsletter of the Entomological Society of America (ESA) at http://www.entsoc.org/newsletter/2000/current/. ELECTRONIC REPRINTS OFFER MORE FOR LESS! ESA now offers authors an unlimited supply of electronic reprints (e-prints) of their articles for 25% less than the price of 100 paper reprints. Authors who purchase e-prints can increase their article's readership by giving readers immediate free Web access to the article. ESA is perhaps the first scientific publisher to take this step to determine if free, immediate, and unlimited Web access for readers is something for which authors are willing to pay. ESA's electronic reprints are PDF files posted on the ESA website (http://www.entsoc.org/pubs/) as soon as the printed issues are mailed, and are hyperlinked to each journal's Table of Contents. The PDF icon on the Contents page indicates which articles are available electronically. PDF files can be read with Adobe Acrobat Reader, available free from http://www.adobe.com Purchasing e-prints allows authors to: o print as many copies of their article as they wish; o quickly and easily send their article to others as an e-mail attachment; o permit colleagues, institutions, or others to post the reprint, or link to the author's web site or ESA's server; and o post their article on their own web page, and submit the URL to search engines such as Yahoo or AltaVista to further increase its readership. The pricing schedule for e-prints is included with the information packet sent to authors with their page proofs. Take advantage of this economical and convenient service and publish with ESA. -- Although the items says "perhaps" I believe that ESA is the first and still the only journal publisher that facilitates immediate, totally free Web access to articles for which the authors have paid a fair price for the service. [Please note that the PDF file provides a faithful copy of the archived version of the article. Please note further that ESA hopes to soon include immediate posting on PubMed Central as part of the service.] Tom Walker ============= Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology University of Florida, PO Box 110620, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@gnv.ifas.ufl.edu FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/tjwbib/walker.htm =
Freedom of information - the impact on biomedical science
This e-mail was sent by BioMed Central http://www.biomedcentral.com ___ FREEDOM OF INFORMATION: THE IMPACT OF FREE ACCESS ON BIOMEDICAL SCIENCE 6-7 July 2000, New York Academy of Medicine FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Science is changing. Soon, scientific research will be made freely available to all online. PubMed Central and other free access initiatives are making it clear that the way science is communicated, used and done will change forever. But what will the impact of free access publishing be on the working lives of scientists, publishers, librarians and the general public? And what effect will free access to research have on science itself? Some of the key players from the scientific community are due to discuss these issues at a conference to be held on 6-7 July 2000 in New York. "Personal computers and the Internet promise revolutionary changes in methods of scientific publishing that have persisted for three hundred years," says Dr Harold Varmus, President of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center who will address the conference. "Now we have the opportunity, and the imperative, to distribute scientific findings in a fashion that allows free access and serves the scientific community and the public in a highly responsible way. We need to know how this will change the way we, as scientists, go about our business." "Not all publishers and librarians are adding enough value to the information they handle," says Jan Velterop, Director of Publishing at Nature who will also be speaking at the conference. "If they are going to continue to earn their existence, they must find new ways to serve the scientific community. But does "freedom of information" mean information for free? This conference will be a very important forum to discuss this issue." The conference will be held on the 6-7 July 2000 at the New York Academy of Medicine, New York, USA. Information on the event and registration details are available on-line at http://www.biomedcentral.com/conference.asp. There are a limited number of places for the media to attend this event free of charge. To register or receive further information please visit www.biomedcentral.com or contact Andrew McLaughlin on and...@biomedcentral.com or +44 (0)20 7323 0323 Notes 1. Organizing committee: Professor Pat Brown (Associate Professor of Biochemistry at Stanford University), Dr Fiona Godlee (British Medical Journal Publishing Group) Dr David Lipman (Director of the National Center for Biotechnology at the NIH) and Jan Velterop (Publishing Director of Nature) in association with BioMed Central. 2. Dr Harold Varmus's proposal on 5 May 1999 for an archive of electronic publications in the biomedical sciences can be found at: http://www.nih.gov/about/director/pubmedcentral/ebiomedarch.htm 3. Registration to attend the conference will be free to journalists. A fee of $200 (US) for individuals from not-for-profit organizations and $500 (US) to individuals from corporate organizations will be applicable to registrations before 1 June 2000. The fee will rise to $250 (US) and $750(US) respectively after this date. Registration for the event is ONLY online at www.biomedcentral.com 4. Directions to the New York Academy of Medicine can be found at http://www.nyam.org/nyam/info.html 5. BioMed Central is a new publishing house that will give free access to research at www.biomedcentral.com. BioMed Central is part of the Current Science Group - a group of independent companies that collaborate closely with each other to publish and develop information and services for the professional biomedical community. The Group has its head-office in London (UK), with additional offices in Philadelphia, New York and Tokyo. www.current-science-group.com ___ Your registered email address is: t...@gnv.ifas.ufl.edu To unsubscribe please send a blank email to: leave-bmccorpnews-8...@news.biomedcentral.com BioMed Central - Freedom of Information Customer Services - i...@biomedcentral.com http://www.biomedcentral.com ============= Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology University of Florida, PO Box 110620, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@gnv.ifas.ufl.edu FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/tjwbib/walker.htm =
Re: ACS meeting comments on e-prints
It is relevant that Chris Leonard, the author of the ChemWeb piece on the ACS e-pub session, is Project Manager at Elsevier Science in Amsterdam. Tom Walker At 10:40 AM 4/4/00 -0400, Steve Heller wrote: >At the ACS meeting last week theer were some interesting comments on the >many activities discussed in this forum. A write up on this is available >at: > >http://chemweb.com/alchem/2000/news/nw_000331_publish.html > >The opening paragraph says: > >The message from scientific publishers was clear. Government >intervention in the field of journals and databases is not only >unwelcome, but possibly unconstitutional too. This was one of >many fascinating topics discussed as part of the popular CIN >session at the ACS Spring Meeting in San Francisco this week. > >Steve Heller > > > > >Stephen R. Heller, Ph. D. >Guest Researcher >NIST/SRD, Mail Stop: 820/113 >100 Bureau Drive >820 Diamond Avenue, Room 101 >Gaithersburg, MD 20899-2310 USA >Phone: 301-975-3338FAX: 301-926-0416 >E-mail: st...@hellers.com >WWW: www.hellers.com/~steve >-- >As a member of the Organizing Committee, I invite you to attend >Chemistry & the Internet - ChemInt2000; September 23-26, 2000; >Washington, DC. >http://www.chemint.org > = Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology University of Florida, PO Box 110620, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@gnv.ifas.ufl.edu FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/tjwbib/walker.htm =
Re: Is ESA first?
At 02:58 PM 3/13/00 +, you wrote: >On Mon, 13 Mar 2000, Thomas J. Walker wrote: > >> > >sh> The market can then decide whether authors think this is worth the >> > >sh> price -- as long as they are allowed the self-archiving option, hence >> > >sh> the choice... >> >> ESA requires authors to sign a copyright release that has >> no provision for self-archiving. >> >> members of all the remaining scientific societies that >> publish journals should see to it that their societies adopt these two >> policies: >> >> 1. Authors are specifically permitted to self-archive their own versions of >> the paper-archived version of their articles. >> >> 2. Authors are permitted to buy, at a fair price, immediate free Web access >> to their articles. >> >> The first is important because it will demonstrate that the society is not >> trying to control the distribution of content. >> >> The second is important because it offers a market-driven, nondisruptive >> transition to free Web access to all journal articles. > >Thomas, maybe it's just me, but I still can't determine from the >above: Does or does not ESA allow author self-archiving (of their own >final, accepted draft), without having to pay ESA anything extra? If it >does, then this is a true, benign option, and the most progressive one >I've seen to date, completely in harmony with the mission of a learned >society and the possibilities opened up by the new medium. > >Sorry to keep asking you to spell it out, but "no provision" still >sounds abmbiguous to me... > To spell it out, ESA requires its authors to sign away _all_ their rights to their articles. It _should_ do what APS has done and specifically permit self-archiving of the content of the refereed version. In ESA's defense, I am sure ESA's GB would never authorize taking action against an author who self-archived content. In fact I was told that in a straw vote in June 1999, ESA's GB voted unanimously that ESA could not expect to continue to make money selling content. [This vote was not recorded in the minutes.] [Could you be confusing ESA with the Florida Entomological Society, which I told you earlier does not require authors to transfer copyright?] Tom Walker = Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology University of Florida, PO Box 110620, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@gnv.ifas.ufl.edu FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/tjwbib/walker.htm =
Re: Is ESA first?
At 06:43 PM 3/12/00 +, Stevan Harnad wrote: >On Sun, 12 Mar 2000, Thomas J. Walker wrote: > >> Would it be correct to state in the announcement that ESA [Entomological Society of America] is the first >> scientific society to offer its authors immediate free Web access for a >> (modest) price? If not, what scientific societies preceded ESA? > >It might be correct to state that ESA was the first to offer >authors free Web access for a price, but others have offered authors >free Web access for free (e.g., the American Physical Society), by >simply allowing them to self-archive. > > <ftp://aps.org/pub/jrnls/copy_trnsfr.asc> > The author(s) shall have the following rights: > . > . > . > (4) The right to post and update the article on e-print servers as > long as files prepared and/or formatted by APS or its vendors are > not used for that purpose, and as long as access to the server does > not depend on payment of access, subscription, or membership fees. > Any such posting made or updated after acceptance of the article for > publication shall include a copyright notice... > >Note that the APS publisher-formatted files are PDF page-images; >perhaps the right way to describe the service that ESA is offering is >that of archiving those PDF pages-images on behalf of their authors (to >save them the effort of self-archiving their own versions of their >refeeed final drafts). > I think the fact that what ESA is offering is immediate free Web access to the image of the archived paper version is key. Other things being equal, authors want to give those interested the most convenient access possible to what is easily verified as the exact equivalent of the archived version. The fact (if true) that until now, no scientific society has elected to profit from offering its authors this optional new service seems strange, especially in view of the fact that many societies have invested heavily in and are losing money on posting restricted-access electronic versions of their journals. >The market can then decide whether authors think this is worth the >price -- as long as they are allowed the self-archiving option, hence >the choice... > Free Web access as offered by ESA includes the right to self archive and specifically to post the PDF file on any Web server that will have it. The one aspect of this service yet to be implemented is the posting of the articles on PubMed Central. ESA is currently trying to arrange this. Tom Walker = Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology University of Florida, PO Box 110620, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@gnv.ifas.ufl.edu FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/tjwbib/walker.htm =
Is ESA first?
In June 1999, the Entomological Society of America starting offering authors in its journals immediate free Web access for their articles (a.k.a. "electronic reprints"). [It accomplishes this by making the PDF files of the articles freely accessible on its server.] In December, it lowered the price to 75% of the price of 100 paper reprints. ESA will soon announce to its members this new price and relatively new service. Would it be correct to state in the announcement that ESA is the first scientific society to offer its authors immediate free Web access for a (modest) price? If not, what scientific societies preceded ESA? [The Florida Entomological Society has been giving immediate free Web access to its authors since 1994, but will start charging for it when subscriptions decline.] Tom Walker ===== Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology University of Florida, PO Box 110620, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@gnv.ifas.ufl.edu FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/tjwbib/walker.htm =
Re: What should society publishers do?
I'm pleased to find that Stevan and I agree that both self-archiving and sales of "offprints" or "IFWA" to authors prior to the abandonment of paper may speed the transition to a system where all articles are freely accessible on the Web and publication charges are paid by the authors and their supporting institutions. I'd like to add to the "What should society publishers do?" thread by commmenting on two of Stevan's answers to questions I posed in a previous thread: At 04:08 PM 2/22/00 +, Stevan Harnad wrote: >On Tue, 22 Feb 2000, Thomas J. Walker wrote: > >> Question: If FES's revenues from institutional subscriptions begin a steep >> decline, how should FES garner enough revenues to continue publishing paper >> issues until its members are willing to forego them? > >Charge more and more for paper, but don't try to stop the online >version from being made available free by the author. (This would make >the situation much more realistic.) > Charging more for institutional subscriptions will likely cause a steeper decline in revenues from that source. Libraries have a serials crisis, and they have little excuse to continue their subscriptions as long as FES is giving IFWA to all its authors. When FES raised its institutional subscription price by 25% in 1999, it lost 11% of its institutional subscribers (http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/fewww/sep99fig.htm). Charging members more for subscriptions also has its problems. Some members may belong largely to receive the societies journal (in paper). When FES raised dues in 1999, membership suffered. >> Question: Should FES not sell publisher-provided IFWA at a fair price to >> those authors who wish to pay for it? > >Yes, as long as FES does not try to stop self-archiving by those who don't. > I've always agreed with Stevan that societies should not try to stop, and probably cannot stop, self-archiving. FES has never put any restrictions on authors distributing their articles before or after refereeing or publication. I think it is time for scientific societies to come down squarely on the side of providing as much free access as quickly as possible and to discuss honestly with members the options for, and the fiscal difficulties of, transitioning to what is desirable and (in the opinion of many) inevitable: free Web access to all refereed articles. Tom Walker = Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology University of Florida, PO Box 110620, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@gnv.ifas.ufl.edu FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/tjwbib/walker.htm =
What should society publishers do?
With this posting, I'd like to start a new thread, prompted by a paragraph in Stevan's first response to my reintroducing the possibility of transition to free Web access via sales of e-reprints. At 05:29 PM 2/21/00 +, Stevan Harnad wrote: >No, in my opinion, the paid-reprint strategy is incoherent and leads >nowhere. Yes, the self-archiving strategy is more "confrontational," >but what it is confronting is a conflict of interest between research >and publication that is intrinsic in the status quo, and that will not >be resolved voluntarily by the interests that are pitted against those >of research and researchers. (Why should it be? If I were an >established journal publisher, I would not let go of the S/L/P revenue >stream unless I had to.) Commercial journal publishers and society journal publishers have different stakeholders to answer to. If members of scientific societies want their societies to offer IFWA (immediate free Web access) for the price of 100 paper reprints, the society should offer it. This is especially true since societies are strapped to fund e-versions of paper-published journals, and IFWA sales could bring profits that could pay for e-publishing non-IFWA articles (immediately, with restricted access) or backfiles (with free access). >From 1994 until 1999, researchers that I discussed the matter with and those attending my talks on e-publication did not personalize the advantage of e-publication of journal articles. Starting last year, researchers seem to realize that Web access was superior to library access _for them_ and that free access should be affordable. For the first time, there seems to be the likelihood that most authors want IFWA and would be willing to begin to pay for it. [Remember, many members of this forum believe that authors and their institutions will eventually be willing to pay for it.] Two reasons that those running scientific societies have not already offered their authors IFWA is that they are scared of free Web access to journal articles and their members have not demanded that it be offered. Now that members are beginning to yearn for IFWA and will soon demand it, I predict society publishers will start offering it. One society has recently started: In June 1999 the Governing Board of the Entomological Society of America, which publishes four well-respected entomological journals, voted to offer IFWA in the form of "unlimited PDF reprints" for _less_ than the price of 100 reprints. In December 1999 the Board voted to post articles on PubMed Central for the same price as ESA's unlimited PDF reprints, unless there were significant additional expenses incurred by PMC posting. In the latter case, the price would be increased to cover the additional cost. Question for discussion: What should a society do relative to making its journals Web accessible during the transition from the current system to a system of free access to all refereed journal literature with quality control and certification paid for by publication fees? Tom Walker ========= Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology University of Florida, PO Box 110620, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@gnv.ifas.ufl.edu FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/tjwbib/walker.htm =
Re: Should Publishers Offer Free-Access Services?
At 07:31 PM 2/21/00 +, Stevan Harnad wrote: >I'm afraid Tom has not answered any of the points I raised about the >relative advantages and disadvantages of IFWA (Immediate Free Web >Access) via paid journal o-prints vs. free self-archiving: > What are "o-prints"? [=online reprints?] Whatever they are, why should "o-prints" be used in place of previously suggested terms. >On Mon, 21 Feb 2000, Thomas J. Walker wrote: > >> For this transition to occur, authors and their supporting institutions >> must be willing to pay for IFWA, which at first might seem to be a stopper. > >No, one can have IFWA for free, immediately, through self-archiving in >Open Archives, now. > >http://www.openarchives.org/ > >> Most authors who buy paper reprints will probably conclude that they >> can forego them > >And most authors, knowing they can get IFWA for free by self-archiving, >will probably conclude that they can forego needless journal o-print >charges, regardless of how low they may be. > That is your opinion. Mine is that most authors publishing in their societies' journals will forego self-archiving and choose to pay a fair fee for a new service that their society offers and they want to have. This seems especially likely when the service is better and cheaper than a service they are already buying but will now no longer need (paper reprints). Now let's consider "regardless of how low they [IFWA charges] may be." The Florida Entomological Society (FES) has been providing all its authors IFWA since 1994 _with no additional charge_. In 1995 it started calling this new, free service "electronic reprints." The motivation in giving the service that name was to make it easier for the Society to eventually charge for the service. It suspected that revenues from institutional subscriptions would decline because all articles were immediately available on the Internet (first on Gopher, then on WWW). The expected decline in subscription revenues has yet to occur (http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/fewww/sep99fig.htm). However, if it does, FES intends to start charging for its IFWA service and to make the price commensurate with its cost (which includes loss of revenues from institutional subscriptions). Question: If FES's revenues from institutional subscriptions begin a steep decline, how should FES garner enough revenues to continue publishing paper issues until its members are willing to forego them? Question: Should FES not sell publisher-provided IFWA at a fair price to those authors who wish to pay for it? FES expects to pay for publication solely from IFWA charges in the all-e future. Question: How should societies that publish journals plan for the transition to the all-e future? >> When (and if) IFWA sales becomes great enough to encourage subscription >> cancellations, the price of IFWA can be raised to compensate for declining >> subscription revenues. Then, unless sales of IFWA decline, the path to the >> new system will be clear. > >But given the free IFWA option, i.e., self-archiving, clearly >available, what else can IFWA sales do but decline as their cost goes >up? > If authors don't want to pay the increasing costs of publisher-provided IFWA they can forego IFWA or switch to self-archiving. The option of self-archiving should be one thing that keeps the price of publisher-provided IFWA low. >> I believe that the path will be clear because IFWA is becoming increasingly >> valuable as more and more journals establish online versions and try to add >> value to them by providing hyperlinks to the full text of entries in their >> Reference Cited sections. > >No, IFWA (Immediate Free Web Archiving) is free through self-archiving, >and free archives are being reference-hyperlinked too (and without any >financial firewalls to cross from reference to reference): > >http://journals.ecs.soton.ac.uk/x3cites/ > IFWA is IFWAccess not IFWArchiving. The emphasis is upon immediate access to current refereed articles rather than the archiving of same. The option of reference-hyperlinking to any IFWA article is clearly there, but getting publishers to actually do it is another matter. For example, Entomological Society of America began restricted-access publishing of its four major journals last year but has so far not reference-linked to Florida Entomologist articles (in spite of my urging). Can you name a journal publisher in biology or medicine that reference-hyperlinks to self-archived articles? >> Only those works that are freely accessible or for which the >> publisher has special access can be so linked. > >Alas, no; firewalled reference-linking (with S/L/P barriers to cross to >get to the literature) is perfectly possible, and already e
Re: Should Publishers Offer Free-Access Services?
Publishers selling, and authors buying, immediate free Web access (IFWA) to refereed articles is one way that the current system of paying for journal publication may evolve from the current system, in which researchers and their supporting institutions pay for subscriptions, to a new system, in which researchers and their supporting institutions pay publication charges. The new system would have two advantages, long-recognized in this forum: (1) free Web access to the refereed literature and (2) substantially lower total cost. For this transition to occur, authors and their supporting institutions must be willing to pay for IFWA, which at first might seem to be a stopper. However, from data for 7 journals published by 4 biological or medical societies, I conclude that about 90% of authors currently buy at least 100 paper reprints. The price of IFWA need be no higher than that the price of 100 paper reprints for publishers to profit greatly. Most authors who buy paper reprints will probably conclude that they can forego them, because nearly everybody everywhere can print as many electronic reprints as they want at their desks (or can easily get a friend or colleague to do it). When (and if) IFWA sales becomes great enough to encourage subscription cancellations, the price of IFWA can be raised to compensate for declining subscription revenues. Then, unless sales of IFWA decline, the path to the new system will be clear. I believe that the path will be clear because IFWA is becoming increasingly valuable as more and more journals establish online versions and try to add value to them by providing hyperlinks to the full text of entries in their Reference Cited sections. Those reading an article value immediate access to the works that are cited by it. Only those works that are freely accessible or for which the publisher has special access can be so linked. Thus those authors whose articles are _freely_ Web accessible will especially benefit from increased employment of external hyperlinks, as will the institutions that support them. [Publishers will be more likely to hyperlink to PubMed Central postings than to self-archived articles, because it will be simpler and because publishers are unlikely to go out of their ways to encourage self-archiving.] The value of IFWA becomes even clearer when one considers the online versions of major literature indexes (such as Current Contents, Biological Abstracts, CAB, and Agricola). Users of these indexes would like immediate access to the full text of their hits. Producers of these indexes will compete to add value to their products by including as many external links as possible. Thus IFWA articles should be immediately accessible from online indexes. Non-IFWA articles (=those with restricted access) cannot be linked or the links will work only for those who are qualified by having subscriptions or by belonging to an institution that has a site license. Do authors want anyone using one of these indexes to have immediate access to their current articles? Do institutions want such access to the results of the research they have sponsored? If the answers are YES, society publishers will be an untenable position if they refuse to offer their authors that option. And all publishers that offer IFWA will profit from it, which just might speed the transition to universal free access. Tom Walker = Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology University of Florida, PO Box 110620, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@gnv.ifas.ufl.edu FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/tjwbib/walker.htm =
Re: Open Archiving: What are researchers willing to do?
This is in response to Marvin Margoshes' concern about illegal posting of articles by the authors of those articles (which I consider ethical). TJW: >> Authors might judge it ethical to post any of their articles older than 1 >> or 2 years without asking permission for these two reasons: (1) they are >> making the results of publicly supported research public; (2) they are not >> reducing the revenues of the publisher. >> >> I have decided that such posting is ethical and have a clickable >> bibliography on my home page >> (http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/tjwbib/walkbib.htm). MM: > >People who violate law for any reason, even based on ethics not greed, need >to know that they are subject to punishment in court. The fact that the >property is intellectual doesn't make it any different than taking physical >property that you don't own. > One of the intriguing aspects of copyright law is that very few cases go to court and hence there is very little case law to limit what persons of different views can imagine would happen if a particular violation did go to court. In a satellite conference on Web copyright issues that I attended two years ago, I learned from experts in the field that the two ways to invite legal action in regards to copyright were to (1) Cause a copyright holder to lose a significant amount of money or to lose the opportunity to make that money. (2) Continue violating a copyright after warning. As for (1), if posting old articles on authors' home pages costs publishers, I would like publishers to explain how and how much (and I will post their explanations on my e-pub gateway site at http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/fewww/tjwonwww.htm). Alternatively, can anyone come up with an example of an old journal article that has brought a publisher a significant amount of profit? (Examples from more than a five years ago probably aren't relevant. Collections of old journal articles sold as texts seem to have gone out of style.) As for (2), here is what I suggest to authors: "If a publisher asks you to take an article off the Web because it violates the publisher's copyright, my advice is to obey quickly, tell the publisher why you thought the posting was ethical and why the publisher should make it legal, and, in place of the article's clickable link, put a notice that the article had been posted but was removed at the publisher's request." (from http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/5810/09eJArtW.PDF) Tom Walker = Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology University of Florida, PO Box 110620, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@gnv.ifas.ufl.edu FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/tjwbib/walker.htm =
Re: Open Archiving: What are researchers willing to do?
At 09:59 AM 11/16/99 -0500, you wrote: >- Original Message - >From: Thomas J. Walker >To: >Sent: Tuesday, November 16, 1999 8:46 AM >Subject: What are researchers willing to do? > > >> To find out what those attending my two most recent talks were willing to >> do to promote free access, I asked in a questionnaire if they would-- >> > >> (3) post their old articles on their home pages without permissions from >> copyright-holding publishers? >> >> [80% would] > >Interesting that 80% said that they will break the law. Is ignorance of the >law or something else behind this? > I have posted a handout on how to put your own reprints on the Web. It is at http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/5810/09eJArtW.PDF. Here is some of what I say about the question you raise: Might illegal posting be ethical? Asking for permission to post old articles is time consuming and frustrating. When I tried it several years ago, a common response was no response. Authors might judge it ethical to post any of their articles older than 1 or 2 years without asking permission for these two reasons: (1) they are making the results of publicly supported research public; (2) they are not reducing the revenues of the publisher. I have decided that such posting is ethical and have a clickable bibliography on my home page (http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/tjwbib/walkbib.htm). At seminars that I recently gave to two university life science departments, one item on a written questionnaire asked if the seminar participants would post, without getting specific permission, PDF files of their own articles that were two or more years old. Of the 35 who answered, 28 checked yes (http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/fewww/Questans.pdf). Note: If a publisher asks you to take an article off the Web because it violates the publisher's copyright, my advice is to obey quickly, tell the publisher why you thought the posting was ethical and why the publisher should make it legal, and, in place of the article's clickable link, put a notice that the article had been posted but was removed at the publisher's request. Tom Walker = Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology University of Florida, PO Box 110620, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@gnv.ifas.ufl.edu FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/tjwbib/walker.htm =
Open Archiving: What are researchers willing to do?
Researchers should be highly motivated to make their refereed articles freely accessible on the Web. Thus far, however, their interest and actions relative to such access have been minimal. For example, few life scientists have taken the offered opportunity to post their refereed articles on central e-print servers. I was therefore pleased to find, at three talks given to groups of 25 or more life-science researchers during the past year, that most such researchers have finally concluded that the Web will revolutionize their access to journal articles. Also they are beginning to realize that free Web access is affordable and much more desirable than the tollgate access that most publishers are currently planning and implementing. To find out what those attending my two most recent talks were willing to do to promote free access, I asked in a questionnaire if they would-- (1) petition the societies to which they belong to take fiscally responsible steps toward free access? [98% would] (2) submit an alternative copyright release with their next paper? [87% would] (3) post their old articles on their home pages without permissions from copyright-holding publishers? [80% would] The complete questionnaire and results are posted at http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/fewww/FWApage.htm#Quest At my gateway site to e-publication of journals (http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/fewww/tjwonwww.htm) are also posted-- ** The future of scientific journals: free Web access? [PowerPoint presentation used for seminars at Florida State University and University of Florida, Oct. 1999] http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/fewww/FWApage.htm ** Three things researchers can do to promote free access. http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/fewww/3things.htm ** History and results of efforts to get the Entomological Society of America and Florida Entomological Society to embrace fiscally responsible free access to articles in their journals. http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/fewww/ESAepub.htm and http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/fewww/tjwonwww.htm#epub ** Sample petitions to societies. http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/fewww/petit.htm and http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/fewww/resolut2.html ** Links to literature on Web access to journal articles. http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/fewww/epubart.htm = Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology University of Florida, PO Box 110620, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@gnv.ifas.ufl.edu FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/tjwbib/walker.htm =
Costs of digitization
Hal Varian suggested that those interested in costs of digitization should see Richard Lemberg's 1996 UC Berkeley thesis on that subject, and that "JSTOR did some calculations with the same conclusion, which are reported in part by a speech from Bill Bowen, which, I believe, is available on the JSTOR Web site." I failed to find either on the Web, so, in case anyone is interested, Florida Entomological Society recently paid 57 cents a page for indexing, scanning, and OCRing ca 20,000 pages of back issues of its journal (http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/fewww/backissu.html). These are now on the Web with free access (http://www.fcla.edu/FlaEnt/). Does anyone know of other Web-accessible information on the costs of putting back issues of journals on the Web? ========= Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology University of Florida, PO Box 110620, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@gnv.ifas.ufl.edu FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/tjwbib/walker.htm =
Re: Should Publishers Offer Free-Access Services?
At 06:23 PM 6/17/99 -0400, you wrote: >On Fri, 11 Jun 1999, Thomas J. Walker wrote: > >> I've not understood why you seem so opposed to authors/institutions >> paying for free access now [by buying PDF reprints], even though you >>think (and I agree) that authors/institutions will ultimately pay >>publication charges (for free access). > >Tom, > >And I've never understood why you didn't understand why I was opposed! I >will try to spell it out again in a minimum of words. > >(1) Authors can provide free access to their work RIGHT NOW by >self-archiving it all on their institutional servers and/or LANL and/or >CogPrints and/or (eventually) E-biomed/Scholar's-Forum. > True--if they want to go to the trouble of putting their work in a place where their colleagues aren't conditioned to look and if they don't mind violating the copyright agreement they have signed. >(2) This is precisely what 100,000 LANL authors have done already. > But how many authors are posting to CogPrints? The point of PDF reprints is to quicken the pace toward free Web access and to help authors/institutions and publishers make the transition from users-pay to authors/institutions pay. Incidentally, as I understand it, LANL authors generally provide the text of the refereed version but not the formatted, official version. As you and Paul G. say in your citation-linking proposal, "Authors might wish to have arrangements for official links with the published version in order to provide an authenticated draft, or one in which the paper page images can be viewed or cited by page and line." Publishers should be paid for the services they provide, even if it is for posting the formatted, official version on the Web. >(3) Hence there is no earthly reason why they should want to pay anyone >to do that for them. > Here are three reasons: convenience, ethics, and better exposure. >(4) There is equally no reason why they should want to pay anyone for >reprint rights. > Authors should pay for services they receive. PDF reprints have no more to do with "reprint rights" than do paper reprints. Authors who choose not to buy paper reprints can and do distribute photocopies. Infinite PDF reprints are a better buy for an author than are 100 paper reprints when they are priced the same. Selling PDF reprints at that price is also more profitable for the publisher, because PDF reprints are cheaper to produce. Publishers don't offer them because they hope to delay or prevent free Web access to the journal literature. >(5) There IS an UNearthly (needless, unconstructive, unjustifiable, >counterproductive) reason authors might feel they HAVE to pay for the >right to self-archive their own papers, given to their journal >publisher for free, and that is if they were foolish enough to sign a >copyright agreement that DENIED them that right (except if they buy it >back again). > >But the solution to (5) is for authors to refuse to sign any copyright >agreement denying self-archiving rights, and to self-archive any paper >for which they have not explicitly signed away their right to do so. > That would be the solution _if_ you could get authors to spend time confronting a system that, in their view, isn't broken. As they taste the advantages of free Web access to their articles through self-archiving and PDF reprints, they will realize the system, broken or not, needs changing! >And if/when they HAVE inadevrtently signed it away, they should DEMAND it >back, not BUY it back; the latter would be adding insult to injury, and a >horrible precedent for the future. There is no reason (scientific, >moral, logical or practical) why what is permitted to (e.g.) APS >authors should not be permitted to all authors. > They don't inadvertently sign their rights away. They do it because they don't yet see the bad consequences, and they want to get on with their research rather than risk a hassle. >http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Author.Eprint.Archives/0006 .html > >And if they cannot get back the right to self-archive the final draft, >they should simply self-archive a penultimate draft, rather than the >final one, incorporating into it whatever there is of scientific >substance that needs be incorporated to make it as archivally useful as >the copyrighted final draft. Self-archiving of the prior unrefereed >preprints is also a good way of asserting this incontestable right. > >There is a slippery slope there in favour of the author, in those >anomalous cases where author and publisher are in conflict rather than >in harmony -- as they ought to be, about copyright "protection." >(Copyright law was not drafted to protect authors from themselves!) > >For the record: My advocacy of aut
Re: Citation-Linking
From: "Thomas J. Walker" Stevan-- The project that you and Paul Ginsparg are planning (http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/citation.html) should greatly speed the pace toward that seamless web of refereed journal articles more and more researchers are wanting. And as soon as enough researchers want it strongly enough it will happen. All researchers will owe a lot to you and Paul. What you say in section 9d of the proposal prompts me to wonder if you're wavering in your opposition to "PDF reprints." In case you are, here is some reinforcement: One reason that researchers will want that seamless web strongly is that they have experienced the benefits of their refereed articles being freely Web accessible. An almost effortless and indisputably ethical way for them to experience free Web access is to pay the journal publisher the price of 100 reprints to make their article freely accessible in PDF format. This is not a page charge but payment for a new and better way to distribute reprints. It is a win for authors, because they get what they want without confrontation or violation relative to the copyright they sign away and because PDF reprints require less bother and total expense than traditional reprints. It is a win for publishers, because their profits on PDF reprints are much greater than for traditional reprints. (They resist it though, because of the third win.) It is win for the cause of seamless, free Web access to the journal literature, because it will make researchers fervently want such access and because it smoothes the transition from the current users-pay system to an authors/institutions-pay system. Tom ========= Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology University of Florida, PO Box 110620, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@gnv.ifas.ufl.edu FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/tjwbib/walker.htm =
Re: E-Biomed: Very important NIH Proposal
Here is the current draft of what I intend to send Varmus. Any comments? -- Your E-biomed proposal will help the biomedical community understand the advantages of barrier-free Web access to the refereed journal literature. Once biomedical researchers understand the advantages, they will no longer tolerate the status quo and will promote E-biomed. However, the change will be slowed if commercial publishers and some scientific societies retain the hope that they can continue to generate most of their revenues by charging researchers and research libraries for access to the journal literature. This hope will cause them to actively oppose E-biomed. You can quicken the shift to free access by requiring NIH-supported researchers to post their manuscripts on E-biomed at the time they submit them to the journals they choose and by requiring that the refereed version be made publicly Web-accessible on E-biomed within one year of publication. The precedent for requiring that publicly supported research be publicly accessible is clear. Articles published by federally employed researchers remain in the public domain by law. The reason for giving a one-year grace period before the refereed versions must be freely Web accessible is twofold. (1) It allows publishers to maintain or greatly slow the loss of subscription revenue so long as paper remains the archived format. Subscriptions will continue because researchers want the refereed versions of articles as soon as possible and research libraries will continue to provide such access. (2) It offers publishers a means to smooth the transition from the present users-pay system to a future authors-pay system. The permitted delay of a year allows publishers to charge authors for immediate posting to E-biomed. Many NIH-sponsored researchers would pay the charge because it would make the formatted, refereed, archived version of their articles freely Web accessible at least a year sooner than otherwise, and it would save them the trouble of complying with NIH's requirement to post the refereed version in some other fashion. Publishers could charge for this service what the market would bear, but, until their subscription revenues are threatened by all or nearly all authors paying for immediate free access, they will likely keep the price modest. A modest price will entice more authors to pay for a service that costs publishers next to nothing to implement. The price of immediate free Web access to the refereed version will eventually influence which journals authors choose for their manuscripts. If subscriptions to a journal decline because all or nearly all authors started buying immediate free access, the publisher would have to raise the price for such access, or cut costs. Those of us who predict free access to the journal literature after paper publication stops see competition in the status of journals and in the prices of their services (largely refereeing?) as the way to an efficient system for certifying published research results. In summary, your proposal that authors retain the copyright to their articles is the wedge that should convince all parties that Web access to research literature will become barrier free. By allowing NIH authors to delay a year before posting their refereed versions on E-biomed, you will give publishers more time to adjust to the fact that E-biomed will revolutionize the biomedical journal literature and the roles of publishers and libraries in providing access to it. --- = Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology University of Florida, PO Box 110620, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@gnv.ifas.ufl.edu FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/tjwbib/walker.htm =
Re: 2.0K vs. 0.2K
At 03:27 PM 5/12/99 -0400, you wrote: >On Wed, 12 May 1999 13:10:27 -0400, Thomas J. Walker wrote: > >>I submit that APA > >S, not A!!! It's aps.org! Sorry. I'm a little dyslexic. > >> would be more fiscally responsible and be doing more for >>facilitating the transition from the current user-pays system to a future >>author-pays system by charging for the service of putting the refereed, >>formatted, archived versions of articles on xxx immediately upon >>publication. > >My argument here has been that fiscal responsibility, unless we go to >a different copyright licensing scheme, seems to require a large >charge (up to $1500) to cover our first-copy costs, but such a large >fee is not likely to facilitate any transition. Maybe we could get away >with a smaller charge at first, but if it was taken up in any significant >numbers then we really would be subject to various threats to subscription >revenues. I don't understand why the choices have to be: (1) give the service away (2) forbid authors to do it themselves, but let them get away with doing it (3) charge the price you think you would have to charge if APS were in the all-e future. Until libraries and other subscribers start cancelling subscriptions, why not make some money by offering the service at a modest mark-up, while being up front with your authors that they are not coming close to paying for the service they are getting (but they don't need to for the time being because libraries are taking up the slack.) You should also be up front that as subscriptions decline the price will have to go up and authors who choose not to pay will have to be content with their unrefereed e-prints being on xxx until the embargo period of 1 or 2 years has passed. Unless we could somehow distinguish between the PDF version or >whatever is posted to xxx and the other versions (XML, perhaps) we make >available. There may be a way to do this that makes sense, but I don't >see it there yet. > My papyrocentric view is that so long as paper is the archived version, most researchers would prefer the APS-posted, official PDF version rather than anything the author could legally self-archive. If that is the case, researchers would have a variety of choices as to when and how their articles become publicly Web accessible. The safety valves on this system would be that APS would post to xxx the official version of all articles a year or two after publication and that authors could immediately post their own renderings of the refereed version (but not PDF files made by scanning the official versions). Without these features, some authors might claim that APS is forcing them to violate the copyright agreements they have signed. Cheers, Tom = Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology University of Florida, PO Box 110620, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@gnv.ifas.ufl.edu FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/tjwbib/walker.htm =
Re: 2.0K vs. 0.2K
At 04:03 PM 5/12/99 +0100, you wrote: >Arthur Smith says that the APS will allow authors to self-publish free >versions of their papers, as well as an APS-created rendition of the same >paper, and is considering a license agreement where the author retains full >copyright. Allowing the free posting of APS pages is an absolute bonus. As >far as I can see, allowing >1 free posting of all **author-created** copy (that includes revisions for >refereed versions) >2 backed by a non-exclusive licence of some form for enhanced publication >is **all** that is needed to begin the beneficial transformation of >scholarly publishing on the Web. > >The real question is, does this position enhance APS' competitive position >or detract from it? If it detracts, then this may not remain 'current >official policy' for long (noting also that APS will not now be able to >revert to any previously-held position). If it enhances, presumably other >publishers will move to emulate it. > It doesn't pay APA's bills and it doesn't help authors get used to the notion that if they want their refereed versions freely and immediately Web accessible someone needs to pay APA for its services. I submit that APA would be more fiscally responsible and be doing more for facilitating the transition from the current user-pays system to a future author-pays system by charging for the service of putting the refereed, formatted, archived versions of articles on xxx immediately upon publication. They could put all the rest on xxx a year (or more) later, so as not to give to some what they are selling to others. Tom W. ===== Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology University of Florida, PO Box 110620, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@gnv.ifas.ufl.edu FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/tjwbib/walker.htm =
Re: 2.0K vs. 0.2K
At 02:41 PM 5/10/99 +0100, you wrote: >On Mon, 10 May 1999, Thomas J. Walker wrote: > >> Since 1994, the Florida Entomological Society >> has *given* e-reprints to all Fla. Entomol. authors as an added service. >> This service is paid from the $45 per page fee that authors have paid since >> 1990. However, if library subscriptions begin to drop, e-reprints may then >> be sold rather than given away. > >Until journals scale down to their one essential service, peer review, >and let public archives like LANLe (and E-biomed and Scholar's Forum, as >soon as they are ready) handle the rest. The page charge will be for that >service, not for the e-prints. > Do you mean that you do not want authors to pay a little now for a service that you expect them to pay more for later? To put the formatted, archived version of a refereed article on the Web server that is most convenient to those who might want to access the article is a service that is surely worth something to authors. (That is why I don't understand why APA doesn't offer it, while at the same time requiring authors to sign away their right to do it themselves.) > >> Secondly, my proposal does not assume that S/L/P can persist. It assumes >> that paper publication isn't going to end immediately and that in the >> meanwhile some authors will want to pay a fee (e.g., price of 100 paper >> reprints) to secure immediate, permanent, toll-free Web access for the >> formatted, refereed, archived version of their articles... > >They can get almost exactly that for free already, by self-archiving >their final, refereed drafts in their local and global servers, as >above. > Not so. Authors cannot yet expect other researchers to look for their work where they have signed an agreement not to put it. >> APS is coming close to giving such access away (!) but [...PDF...] > >The exact PDF page images are not worth the extra money. The (refereed, >accepted) figures and text, reformatted without pages for online >self-archiving, are just fine. Under my plan, authors would be able to decide this themselves. Do those using the physics literature not want to know what page particular text is on and don't they feel that the equivalent of a photocopy of the archived version is more reliable than with any lesser representation of the final refereed version? Tom W. = Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology University of Florida, PO Box 110620, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@gnv.ifas.ufl.edu FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/tjwbib/walker.htm =
Re: 2.0K vs. 0.2K
At 03:53 PM 5/7/99 +0100, Stevan Harnad wrote: >> Date: Thu, 6 May 1999 13:52:06 -0400 (EDT) >> From: "Arthur P. Smith" >> >I know and profoundly appreciate (and unfailingly acknowledge) that! >APS sits on the side of the angels in this (and in many other things)! > >> In fact, Tom Walker's >> journal does NOT allow this unless authors pay their electronic >> reprint fee. > >And it is for this reason that I have suggested since the >beginning of the American Scientist Forum that although Tom's heart is >undeniably in the right place, his proposal is unrealistic. Not only >does it assume that S/L/P can persist, but it imagines that authors >will pay page charges on TOP of S/L/P even though they could achieve >the very same result for free, by self-archiving! > Firstly, if Tom Walker's journal is the Florida Entomologist (for which he is the WWW Associate Editor), that journal has yet to charge authors for their electronic reprints. Since 1994, the Florida Entomological Society has *given* e-reprints to all Fla. Entomol. authors as an added service. This service is paid from the $45 per page fee that authors have paid since 1990. However, if library subscriptions begin to drop, e-reprints may then be sold rather than given away. Secondly, my proposal does not assume that S/L/P can persist. It assumes that paper publication isn't going to end immediately and that in the meanwhile some authors will want to pay a fee (e.g., price of 100 paper reprints) to secure immediate, permanent, toll-free Web access for the formatted, refereed, archived version of their articles. In essence it dares publishers to offer for sale *now*, what most authors want (permanent, convenient, toll-free Web access to their articles). It does not require or imply that the price of such access would remain the same if central printing of issues were to cease. So far as I know, no society sells immediate, infinite Web-freedom for the PDF versions of refereed articles. APA is coming close to giving such access away (!) but, if I understand Smith's most recent posting correctly, APA still forbids authors to post the PDF files of their formatted, refereed articles on xxx. Posting on xxx is surely more desirable to physics authors than having the files freely accessible on any other server. Would APA authors be offended if given the chance to pay APA to put their refereed articles on xxx? Is APA tempting its authors to violate their signed agreements by giving them no legal way to have the final PDF files of their articles on xxx? Wouldn't APA be more fiscally responsible and be promoting free access in a more sustainable way by offering this service? It is instructive to consider the response of the Entomological Society of America to the suggestion that it sell infinite electronic reprints to authors of articles in its four principal journals. The Governing Board approved the idea in Dec. 1995 and again in Dec. 1996, but their staff chose not to act. In June 1997, staff and Governing Board finally decided to offer e-reprints, but chose to sell them by the hundred downloads and at the same per-hundred price as for copies of traditional paper reprints. About 10% of authors are buying this limited service now, and I have been told that at its June 1999 meeting, the Governing Board will consider making ESA e-reprints infinite--perhaps to increase ESA publishing revenues to partially cover new costs. New costs, because in late1998, ESA's Governing Board decided to pay about $14 per page above current costs to put ESA's journals on the Web in HTML and PDF. After a six-month free trial period, access will be restricted to subscribers, because ESA must find a way to raise the extra $56,000 per year that this form of e-publication costs. On the other hand, selling e-reprints profits ESA about $14 per page [http://www.amsci.org/amsci/articles/98articles/walkercap4.html] (or even more if you consider that the cost of the PDF files is paid by the $14 above). Most life-science societies that I know have taken actions similar to ESA (except they have not considered offering electronic reprints, infinite or otherwise). The idea that selling immediate free access to some articles (e-reprints) can produce revenues that will pay for delayed free access to all articles has not caught on, but I am still trying to get three societies to consider it seriously. Would not members vote to approve the idea, if given the chance? [For details of ESA actions on e-publication of their journals, see http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/fewww/ESAepub.htm.] Tom Walker = Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology University of Florida, PO Box 110620, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@gnv.ifas.ufl.edu FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/tjwbib/walker.htm =
Re: 2.0K vs. 0.2K
At 10:43 AM 5/7/99 -0400, you wrote: >On Thu, 6 May 1999, Stevan Harnad wrote: > >> On Thu, 6 May 1999, Thomas J. Walker wrote: >> > [...] >> > I was naive to think that Societies would think it win-win to sell at a >> > profit what their authors want. > >If it was something that obviously increased quarterly profits you >can expect the commercial journals to jump on it faster than societies! >We're non-profit after all! :-) > >Arthur (apsm...@aps.org) > Commercial publishers should be doing everything possible to preserve S/L/P because that will allow them to continue their present, generous profits. Society publishers should be doing everything possible, so long as it is fiscally responsible, to speed and promote free access. Their members and authors will eventually demand it, so should not societies lead rather than be pushed or dragged? Selling electronic reprints, so long as paper publication continues, can be quite profitable (and thus fiscally responsible). It would help members and authors become aware of what they are missing and would make it easier for authors to transition to paying publication charges once journals are all-electronic and toll free. Tom ========= Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology University of Florida, PO Box 110620, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@gnv.ifas.ufl.edu FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/tjwbib/walker.htm =
2.0K vs. 0.2K
List-Post: goal@eprints.org List-Post: goal@eprints.org Date: Thu, 06 May 1999 10:07:34 -0400 From: "Thomas J. Walker" To: Stevan Harnad Stevan-- Thought you might be interested in this exchange from earlier this year. I was naive to think that Societies would think it win-win to sell at a profit what their authors want. Cheers, Tom ===== Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology University of Florida, PO Box 110620, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@gnv.ifas.ufl.edu FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/tjwbib/walker.htm = >Date: Thu, 18 Feb 1999 11:47:26 -0500 (EST) >From: "Arthur P. Smith" >Subject: Re: Should Publishers Offer Free-Access Services? >To: "Thomas J. Walker" >X-Authentication-warning: lancelot.aps.org: apsmith owned process doing -bs > >On Thu, 18 Feb 1999, Thomas J. Walker wrote: > >> I posted this to the Sept Amer Scientist in November. I am now writing an >> Annual Review article that includes a discussion of the transition from the >> current journal system to an all-e system. Your answers might help me >> understand the reluctance of journals to sell to authors what they want >> (free, convenient access to their archived refereed articles without their >> having to spend time making it happen). > >Hey, I might have changed my mind... > >> Offering e-reprints would not fool authors. It would give authors a way >> easily to make accessible the archived versions of their articles (that is, >> the official, paper-published version with its formatting and pagination). > >Yup - good point. > >> >> Am I correct in my understanding that APS authors are not specifically >> permitted by APS to post the PDF files of their articles on the XXX server? > >I'm not quite clear on that. I believe the answer is no, they are not allowed >to post the final PDF files - on the other hand the current copyright >agreement does seem to specifically allow them to post the final PDF on >their own web pages. It's a little confusing - our associate publisher is >the one with the official answers, if you need an official answer. And >the copyright agreement is under review (a "license" version has been proposed >and discussed extensively) so the answer may well change in the next few >months. > >> If they are so permitted, they will surely soon learn to do it. If they >> are not permitted to do it, should not APS provide them an ethical, >> convenient, contractual way of having it done for them--namely, by selling >> them the service [which would be equivalent to selling them an infinite, >> permanent supply of toll-free, Web-accessible reprints]? > >Yes, that's certainly worth considering. The reluctance on our part >may come from the complexity of keeping both free and non-free articles - >but really it's only an additional 1-bit tag on the article. There may >also be a reluctance in creating two apparent tiers of articles; those >which are free and those which are not. There is certainly a great >sensitivity here to ability to pay on the part of authors - the "page charges" >here have always been voluntary. And the price could be quite high (a >rough guess is an average $2000 per article). And by making the PDF free >based on initial author payment we may be reducing our options for >data migration in the future (we couldn't very well charge for a >new-fangled XYZ format if the old PDF was still available free, so >how do we fund conversion to XYZ?) But I really can't speak for >the organization on this - we're looking at all sorts of new models, >and this is one that has been considered in the past and may well be again. > >> >> If they are not permitted to do it, and APS declines to sell them the >> service, aren't more and more authors likely to think doing it themselves >> is the only way to accomplish what should be done for the greater good (as >> Steven suggests). And won't APS not only lose revenue it could have earned, >> but also miss a chance to get authors accustomed to doing what Steven and I >> say they will need to do in the all-e future--namely, to pay for making >> their referred versions accessible toll-free on the Web? >> > >Well, I think we don't really look at authors as you do, perhaps. >70% of our authors come from outside the U.S., many come from FSU >or even developing countries where there is no way for the forseeable >future they will be able to pay even what Stevan would agree is >
Re: Should Publishers Offer Free-Access Services?
To resurrect a long dormant thread-- >On Fri, 28 Aug 1998 10:45:02 -0400, Thomas J. Walker wrote: > >>Arthur Smith (apsm...@aps.org): Might e-reprints be a way to evolve into >>free access in an all-electronic future? Authors (or their institutions or >>grants) would get used to paying for immediate toll-free access. (They >>should get delayed toll-free access without charge.) > At 12:24 PM 8/28/98 -0400, Arthur Smith wrote: >No, I don't think claiming you are providing "e-reprints" through >electronic publishing is a good solution. Authors will not be easily >fooled by this (why can they not just post it on an e-print server >and have free unlimited reprints?) Offering e-reprints would not fool authors. It would give authors a way easily to make accessible the archived versions of their articles (that is, the official, paper-published version with its formatting and pagination). Am I correct in my understanding that APS authors are not specifically permitted by APS to post the PDF files of their articles on the XXX server? If they are so permitted, they will surely soon learn to do it. If they are not permitted to do it, should not APS provide them an ethical, convenient, contractual way of having it done for them--namely, by selling them the service [which would be equivalent to selling them an infinite, permanent supply of toll-free, Web-accessible reprints]? If they are not permitted to do it, and APS declines to sell them the service, aren't more and more authors likely to think doing it themselves is the only way to accomplish what should be done for the greater good (as Steven suggests). And won't APS not only lose revenue it could have earned, but also miss a chance to get authors accustomed to doing what Steven and I say they will need to do in the all-e future--namely, to pay for making their referred versions accessible toll-free on the Web? >And why should you delay publication of >possibly important results just because the author was unable or refused >to pay? No one is talking delaying publication. Without e-reprints every article is potentially already available as 1. an unrefereed e-print, 2. refereed hardcopy in the paper journal, 3. as a paper reprint from the author, and 3. as a pdf file (of the refereed hardcopy) on the author's server. A delay in posting the PDF, refereed version of some articles to XXX is the only way to justify charging those authors that want immediate posting. >And why should not readers pay, in some form at least? Readers should not pay because authors of research articles would rather that their readers not have to pay. And the cost of providing their readers free access (so long as paper continues) is negligible. >If >authors pay for everything, the economic pressures will almost certainly >force publishers into a "vanity press" mode, where quality drops through >the floor (authors care little for quality control, it is the reader who >cares). Tell me how you will sustain the quality of existing scientific >journals against the pressure to cut costs and please the author! Authors do care about quality, as do tenure and promotion committees. = Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology University of Florida, PO Box 110620, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@gnv.ifas.ufl.edu FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/tjwbib/walker.htm =
Re: Science 4 September on Copyright
At 12:31 PM 9/9/98 -0400, you wrote: >An understandable summary of the provisions of U.S. copyright law can be >read at http://www.nolo.com/PCTM/2overview.html/ with links to sources of >more detailed information. At that URL, I found: > >3. Who owns a copyright? > >With three important exceptions, copyrights are owned by the >writers, poets, musicians, choreographers, composers, artists, >software designers, sculptors, photographers, movie producers, >craftspersons and other persons who create them. In the copyright >world, these people are all called "authors." Now for the >exceptions: > >If a work is created by an employee in the course of his or her >employment, the work is called a "work made for hire" and the >copyright is owned by the employer." > >Apparently, scientists may academia not personally own the copyright >to their scientific papers, just as they don't often own the patent >rights, unless their employer (the university or college) signs it >over to them. > This is discussed at some length in Shores C. 1996. Ownership of faculty works and university copyright policy. ARL, a Bimonthly Newsletter Of Research Library Issues And Actions No. 189. (on the Web at http://arl.cni.org/newsltr/189/owner.html) The conclusion is that universities are unlikely to try to claim ownership of journal articles. Tom W. = Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology University of Florida, PO Box 110620, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@gnv.ifas.ufl.edu FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/tjwbib/walker.htm =
Re: Should Publishers Offer Free-Access Services?
At 02:45 PM 8/28/98 -0400, Mark Doyle wrote: > >On Fri, 28 Aug 1998, "Thomas J. Walker" wrote: > >> Mark Doyle (do...@aps.org): Do authors in APS journals buy paper reprints? >> Would they buy e-reprints at the same price (or lower)? Would electronic >> reprints be a welcomed new service to APS members? > >Yes, some authors do buy reprints. However, they already have the right to >download the PDF file of their paper and post it on their own web page or >print out as many copies as they want. So this isn't a strong incentive. As >for early access, they have the option to post to xxx (which many do). > Do they have the right to post the PDF file of the printed version on xxx? If so, I certainly would not expect authors to pay for e-reprints. If not, maybe some would pay for that privilege or, more likely, the privilege of having it so that those clicking on "PDF" in APS online tables of contents could get an e-reprint for free rather than having to pay $15. Does the average income from sale of online copies of an APS exceed the cost of 100 paper reprints? Is there any embargo period before authors can post the PDF files of their articles on their home pages? If not, as authors and readers become Web-savy, APS won't be selling very many PDF files of articles for $15. ========= Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology University of Florida, PO Box 110620, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@gnv.ifas.ufl.edu FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/tjwbib/walker.htm =
Re: Should Publishers Offer Free-Access Services?
Vivienne Monty, Senior Librarian, wrote: >--What is of greater concern in for-pay services is that libraries are NOT >paying for archival copies, that is, they are paying for current access >and when they quit paying annual fees, all access is cut off. At least in >the paper world, a library had what they bought and researchers could >refer to materials even centuries later. > This should be a major concern for all researchers. If commercial publishers control the archival access to articles for the duration of copyright (author's life plus 50 years), think of what they might do. (Think the price trends of subscriptions to commercially published journals and then eliminate interlibrary loans!) >--Somehow most who have written on this topic seem to feel that archives >will be around in the ether of it all. Unless we make sure that we have >the same archival systems that we do for paper, I fear none of these >self-published or even society published materials will be around for >long. Technology moves too fast and societies do die. Much has already >been lost in the first computer generated files that no machine can read >today. > In my opinion, libraries should actively solicit scientific societies to post and archive the PDF files of the articles in their paper-published journals. The cost of posting would be trivial--because with toll-free access only a small number of libraries need do it for any one journal. [And after all, libraries are _paying_ commercial publishers for the right to temporarily post PDF files of _their_ articles. For example, Florida Center for Library Automation pays Elsevier a percentage of its paper subscription costs to post (for a few years) PDF files of 650 Elsevier journals on FCLA servers]. The archiving is important and logical for reasons state above. If libraries establish their role as reliable archivers of electronic versions of paper-published journals, they will be in good position to maintain that role in the all-electronic future. If access to journal articles (or what replaces them) is toll-free in that future, libraries should be able to use funds that formerly went for subscriptions and site licenses to pay for the posting and archiving. ============= Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology University of Florida, PO Box 110620, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@gnv.ifas.ufl.edu FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/tjwbib/walker.htm =
Re: Should Publishers Offer Free-Access Services?
In the article that is the origin of this forum, I proposed that electronic reprints should be a way to put traditional journals on the Web and toll-free, while they are still being printed in issues and bought and archived by libraries. An infinite, permanent supply of electronic reprints, you may recall, could be sold to authors for the price of 100 traditional paper reprints [or less]. Because furnishing authors toll-free Web posting of the PDF files of their articles costs so little (less than $3 per page) and supplying 100 paper reprints costs so much (>$10 per page), publishers could increase their reprint profits at the same time they supplied authors what they want: immediate toll-free Web access to their refereed, publisher-formatted, paper-archived articles. As explained and illustrated in my article, e-reprints are not as likely to lead to loss of library subscriptions as one might think. So long as issues are mailed, most libraries will want to supply them to their clients and many will want to archive them as well. In any event, loss of library subscriptions could always be countered by charging more for e-reprints. Thus far, I believe, "electronic reprints" has not appeared in the forum's discussions, so let's start a new thread. Taking off from previous postings-- Mark Doyle (do...@aps.org): Do authors in APS journals buy paper reprints? Would they buy e-reprints at the same price (or lower)? Would electronic reprints be a welcomed new service to APS members? L. W. Hurtado (hurta...@div.ed.ac.uk): Do scholars in the humanities buy reprints of their articles? Would many pay as much for infinite e-reprints as for 100 paper reprints? Could societies in the humanities use extra profits from e-reprint sales to publish larger paper issues and hence reduce publishing queues? Arthur Smith (apsm...@aps.org): Might e-reprints be a way to evolve into free access in an all-electronic future? Authors (or their institutions or grants) would get used to paying for immediate toll-free access. (They should get delayed toll-free access without charge.) Cheers, Tom W. ============= Thomas J. Walker Department of Entomology & Nematology University of Florida, PO Box 110620, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620 E-mail: t...@gnv.ifas.ufl.edu FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/tjwbib/walker.htm =
