At 06:44 PM 9/7/2009, Steven Krivit wrote:
Yeah, copyright is a bit of a throwback to the time when publishers
really did a lot for authors. But in the case where there are
multiple authors such as a proceedings, I think it helps a lot when
a real publishing business handles the job.
Jed has pointed out a solution. Besides, it's still possible to have
a publisher without that "real publishing business." Essentially, the
editor becomes the publisher, or the publisher is a committee
supporting the editor, there are many possibilities.
Let's say you want to buy a copy of the ICCF-14 proceedings in a few
years from now, or you want to get permission to republish text or
image from a paper in the proceedings. If Nagel and Melich are on a
cruise ship to Alaska for a month, you're dead in the water.
Some big assumptions being made!
These benefits are part of what you get for your money when you use
a publisher rather than a printer.
Small benefit, large amount of money.
I've been a publisher. Standard was that books would retail for six
or seven times the cost of printing. Print-on-demand is more
expensive than the printing techniques used by publishers, but ....
all that overhead and distribution cost and markup is eliminated.
If the goal is making money, sure, use a traditional publisher. If
bookstore sales are going to be important, use a traditional
publisher. But if the goal is to make the material available most
readily, don't.
But philosophically speaking, if the whole damn thing was
electronic, available ubiquitously, with each paper's copyright
retained by each author (like it should be) none of this would matter.
Steve
But that's easily done! It can even be done by a system that charges
for downloads or that asks for donations (like shareware), but I
assume that in this field, profit to the authors is not the issue.
Does World Scientific pay authors?
