On Mon, Jan 9, 2012 at 6:00 PM, <[email protected]> wrote: > Hmmmm. Jane, perhaps you might include sorts of institutions other than > universities, such as government agencies, industrial organizations (why > should Exon Mobil get a free ride?), NGOs? >
Sure. Maybe any entity that downloads more than X papers a month. The New York Times has this sort of system. They allow non-subscribers 20 free articles a month. A scientific publisher would have to set a lower threshold than that, but you get the idea. Also, the regulation that ESA's letter was written about includes an embargo period. > Suppose a student or faculty member works at home at night, and makes the > request from there? Free then, but if he makes the request from his office > or a laboratory, he gets dinged? > No, he doesn't get dinged if the university library has a subscription, which it normally would. > Fact is, the publisher has to recoup costs and costs for a a scholarly > organization include things other than publishing. When students first get > into this game most are unaware that authors pay for preprints (including > electronic preprints) and pay page charges for publication. That being the > case, why shouldn't the publisher offset some costs by charging users for > access? Again, libraries would pay for access, as would anyone else who wanted an article during its embargo period. BTW, the part of the letter arguing that an embargo period won't work for ecology journals because our research takes longer than many other kinds is flawed. Citation half-lives are the wrong measure, precisely because our research takes a long time. If I download a paper today, get excited by it, and decide to base a field project on it, I may not publish for several years. This makes the citation half-life much longer than the reading half-life or download half-life. > ESA and most scholarly organizations that publish journals are truly > nonprofit. Elsevier Press is another matter, and "There oughta be a law > ........... ." > Which really stinks for me, as Ecological Modelling is a major journal in my area and is published by Elsevier. There definitely oughta be a law.... Jane Shevtsov -- ------------- Jane Shevtsov Ecology Ph.D. candidate, University of Georgia co-founder, www.worldbeyondborders.org "She has future plans and dreams at night. They tell her life is hard; she says 'That's all right'." --Faith Hill, "Wild One"
