Why is Paul Gherman complicating a simple issue? The dissemination of research results is part of the research process. If an institution is successful, then part of its responsibility should be to make the results known. Surely, the cost of disseminating the research of its faculty and staff (yes, and even its students) can be viewed as advertising its prominence and its success.
Simple page charges are a clean way to handle such transactions. (Although equivalent measures of quantity and processing difficulty will eventually emerge in the electronic world) Negotiating in advance how many pages will be published in a given year in each journal will prove to be impossible. It would be like asking libraries to negotiate in advance how many items will be used next year. The cleverer we try to be with solutions, the more I find myself seeing suggestions which are tailored to the author's individual sector of the information delivery system. We should be trying to optimize the whole system, including taking into account the scholarly community's reluctance to change paradigms rapidly, not just solving our individual problems. I know that astronomy is relatively well funded, and that roughly 80% of our page charges are paid from research grants. But this is also hard won money, and we have had no trouble maintaining the payment of page charges -- at a level which covers 2/3 of the production cost. It might be nice to go to full support by page charges, but our researchers are not willing to take over the whole burden from the libraries. We will maintain the use of page charges to help subsidize the publication costs. We encourage other disciplines to join us in this approach. But, let's not dream up unworkable systems. Peter Boyce _________________________________________________________ Peter B. Boyce - Senior Consultant for Electronic Publishing, AAS email: [email protected] Summer address: (until 10/25/99) 33 York St., Nantucket, MA 02554 Phone: 508-228-9062 _________________________________________________________
