At 03:27 PM 5/12/99 -0400, you wrote: >On Wed, 12 May 1999 13:10:27 -0400, Thomas J. Walker <[email protected]> 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: [email protected] FAX: (352)392-0190 Web: http://csssrvr.entnem.ufl.edu/~walker/tjwbib/walker.htm =========================================================================
