On Tue, Aug 7, 2012 at 11:27 AM, Sally Morris < sa...@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> We should not delude ourselves; journals can only be 'free' if someone pays > the costs. > > All the work involved in creating and running a journal has to be paid for > somehow - they don't magically go away if a journal is e-only (in fact, > there are some new costs, even though some of the old ones disappear). > > I can only see three options for who pays: reader-side (e.g. the library); > author-side (e.g. publication fees); or 'fairy godmother' (e.g. sponsor). > There is a fourth option, which works: the scholarly community manage publication through contributed labour and resources and the net amount of cash is near-zero. This is described in http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2012/03/06/an-efficient-journal/where the J. Machine Learning Research is among the highest regarded journals in the area (top 7%) and free-to-authors and free-to-readers. There is an enlightening debate (on this URL) between those who run the journal and Kent Anderson of the Scholarly Kitchen who cannot believe that people will run and work for journals for the good of the community. There is no law of physics that says this doesn't scale. It is simply that most scholars would rather the taxpayer and students paid for the administration publishing (either as author-side or reader-side) so the scholars don't have to do the work. And they've managed ot get 10 B USD per year. If scholars regarded publishing as part of their role, of if they were prepared to involved the wider community (as Wikipedia has done) we could have a much more C21 type of activity - innovative and valuable to the whole world rather than just academia. It would cost zero, but it would be much cheaper than any current model. And of course we now have a complete free map of the whole world ( openstreetmap.org) which is so much better than other alternatives that many people and organizations are switching to it. And, for many years, it didn't have a bank account and existed on "marginal resources" from UCL (and probably still does). But most people will regard this as another fairy tale. > > -- Peter Murray-Rust Reader in Molecular Informatics Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry University of Cambridge CB2 1EW, UK +44-1223-763069
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