A (very) belated response: On Mon Mar 4, Arthur Smith ([email protected]) asked:
My father (who lives in Canada and reads the Globe & Mail regularly) was just asking me about this article :-) I hope Andrew Odlyzko was misquoted on the "do the same thing for $100,000"! Perhaps he'll explain himself... The precise quote from the Globe & Mail article by Stephen Strauss is: ... Another approach, and one that has already been extensively used in physics and astronomy, is to publish "pre-prints." In this case, papers that have been peer-reviewed but not yet published elsewhere are posted on a server site. University of Minnesota mathematician Andrew Odlyzko has argued that conventional publishing of the 20,000 papers one such site stores a year would require an investment of $40-million to $80-million. The electronic pre-prints do the same thing for $100,000. Note that I am not quoted directly. In fact, Stephen Strauss did not ask me for such a comparison during our phone interview, but rather based this passage in the Globe & Mail on my published articles, where, indeed, I do cite Paul Ginsparg's archive as achieving very low costs, but where I also make it clear that this is costs for archiving and dissemination only, and is not "the same thing" that traditional journals do. I hope this clarifies the issue. Andrew -----Please note new address----- Andrew Odlyzko University of Minnesota Digital Technology Center 499 Walter Library 117 Pleasant St. SE Minneapolis, MN 55455 [email protected] email 612-624-9510 voice phone 612-625-2002 fax http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko
