There have been various comments on our Association's reaction to the Budapest Open Access Initiative. Our response seems to have been somewhat misunderstood: we do not oppose initiatives which advocate the widest possible access to information - far from it, since dissemination is part of the mission of most of our member societies. However, we believe that it is essential that a business model is first found which will pay for all the elements which researchers value. Contrary to Stevan's view, researchers - as authors and as readers - do value very highly the whole spectrum of functions which publishers traditionally perform, and not just peer review itself. Our latest, recently completed, research study established very high ratings for all of the following (listed in order of importance): management (as distinct from execution) of the peer review process; selection of relevant and quality-controlled content; gathering articles together to enable browsing of relevant and quality-controlled content; content editing and improvement of articles; language or copy-editing; checking of citations/adding citation links; and (even) marketing (maximising visibility of journal). Respondents predominantly believe that libraries should continue to pay for these processes in some way, and clearly more thinking and experimentation is urgently needed both on viable alternative business models, and on the potential migration path towards these. Interestingly, other than in physics, respondents mostly had little or no idea what we meant by preprint or eprint archives. The full results of the study, Authors and Electronic Publishing, will be available for sale very shortly and details will appear on our website, http://www.alpsp.org
One small clarification - Bernard Lang was under the impression that members only permitted free archival access to authors. This is not what I meant; a growing number of our member publishers make their online archival volumes freely accessible to all after a certain period. Sally Sally Morris, Secretary-General Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex BN13 3UU, UK Phone: 01903 871686 Fax: 01903 871457 E-mail: [email protected] ALPSP Website http://www.alpsp.org Learned Publishing is now online, free of charge, at www.learned-publishing.org
