At 10:37 15/09/00 -0400, you wrote:
technology to "free" the scholarly literature. A modest way to begin breaking down that resistance, I believe, might be the following: the establishment by professional societies of servers that would make all the conference papers produced at their meetings freely available electronically to all who need them--and in a timely fashion! This would pre-empt the present one year or more lag in the publication of conference papers in print journals.
Absolutely agree. The professional societies *are* supposed to be furthering their profession - that is their raison d'etre. I have always felt that learned publications belong in the hands of the profession they support. Personally, I'm not very sympathetic to commercial-publisher run journals. If the profession believe a particular major 'thread' of their activities requires learned communications then they should sponsor it. However, many professional bodies have slipped into bad habits (overseen by the professions themselves) where they have become dependent on the income generated by their publishing (and conference) activities. This is going to be very difficult to reverse. A sea change in the views of the membership would be required. The members may have to pay more in subscriptions as a result. The cycle *could* complete satisfactorily if the employer then paid (a proportion of) the professional society fees of its employees? The funding route would then be: institution, member, society, society publications instead of institution, library, society, society publications. It is possible that the cost of running the society publications may drop if it becomes fully electronic. It should certainly become faster, which is what we all want. Adrian Pickering/ ECS, University of Southampton, UK
