Peter, I began thinking exactly as you suggest. Institutions paying the charges for their own faculty from library journals budgets. But then I ran the numbers. Vanderbilt spends 1.8 million a year on journal subscription, not all serials. We have 1500 faculty. At a minor charge of $1,000 per article if each faculty member published one article per year, our budget would quickly be gone. Now from what I have heard, $1,000 per article to cover review and editing is at the very low end of the scale. I have found that many of our faculty publish three articles per year, and those at Johns Hopkins 7 per year. I do not think all those institutions where very few faculty publish should get a free ride while the premier universities carry the full load.
And as for a SPARC like organization taking on the role I mentioned, the serials industry has supported jobbers like this ie Faxon, Ebsco, Blackwells as subscription agents for publishers for many years. Establishing a front-end payment system is no different. Paul M. Gherman University Librarian 611B General Library 419 21st Avenue South Vanderbilt University Nashville, TN 37240 Office: (615) 322-7120 Fax: (615) 343-8279 [email protected]
