Article: Free Internet Access to Traditional Journals (Albert Henderson) Marcia Tuttle 24 Sep 1998 23:41 UTC
---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Wed, 23 Sep 1998 22:01:22 -0400 From: Albert Henderson <NobleStation@COMPUSERVE.COM> Subject: Article: Free Internet Access to Traditional Journals (Rob Atkinson) on Fri, 18 Sep 1998 Rob Atkinson <atkinson@FNAL.GOV> wrote: > FYI: There is an interesting, well thought out article in the > September-October 1998 issue of American Scientist, v. 86 no. 5, with title > Free Internet Access to Traditional Journals, by Thomas J. Walker. The > author gives a brief history of scholarly publishing vis costs including > the serials crisis beginning in the 1970s, the serials crisis Web-style, > and continues with an example of a working scheme for cheap digital > publishing and free access at a profit. The piece is library oriented. I > apologize if it has already been brought up here. > Available on-line at > http://www.sigmaxi.org/amsci/articles/98articles/walkerweb.html I read the article with interest. It contains many errors including claiming that the first journal was published by a society and that Federally financed page charges cannot be paid to commercial publishers. More important, I think that the author is a pawn in universities' program of shedding the cost of their libraries. Administrators rammed through a major reallocation of university spending based on the idea of "resource sharing" and the success of Xerox. They cut libraries from 6% to under 3% of university spending. The result was the "serials crisis." They never got approvals from faculty senates or the research community. Then they tried to blame publishers' profits and excessive publishing by researchers. Now, based on the Internet, they hope to cut libraries to less than 1%. When the Copyright Act of 1976 was passed, the costs of the science journal system were borne as follows according to Donald W. King et al. in SCIENTIFIC JOURNALS IN THE UNITED STATES (Dowden Hutchinson, 1981) 12% Authors 14% Publishers 10% Libraries and (A&I) secondary organizations 64% Users King's work on the economics of scientific journals was an enormous undertaking, financed largely by the National Science Foundation at a time when "dissemination" was recognized by science policy as important. It gave us benchmarks like the distribution of costs described above. I feel this is a key question. My understanding of the allocation envisioned by Walker and others who like author subsidized publishing and "free" access-not-ownership would be: 30% authors 70% users No publishers. No libraries. Probably little discernable difference between validated and vanity publications. Albert Henderson, Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY <70244.1532@compuserve.com> . .