On Thursday, January 9, 2003, at 10:39 PM, Steve Hitchcock wrote:
Certainly institutions must do more than Mark Doyle wants, despite the good work APS is doing, which is for publishers to 'grant back to authors all of the rights they expect'. On this issue, institutions must lead, not follow.
Hmm, I not sure what you think I "want." So let me clarify. I want institutions to recognize that scholarly communication is a shared responsibility among authors, their institutions, grant providers, peer-reviewers, and archivers (the latter role is provided by "publishers" today, but that doesn't have to be the case). I want institutions to recognize the costs in carrying out peer-review and in creating high quality archives and I want them to be willing to pay for those costs (that is, I want them to be willing to pay for such things up front so that a subscription model is no longer needed to cover these costs). And I want them to become (paying) partners in providing redundancy in archiving and distribution of peer-reviewed material. In my view, any institution that is willing to pay the costs associated with the publication of the an article up front should have the right to distribute the formatted article and make it freely available as well as incorporate any archival version (say an XML file) into their institutional repository. The problem is mostly one of transition though - enough institutions would need to move to such a model at one time to ensure that APS is able to mitigate the financial risk that would come with undermining the subscription model in a piecemeal way. Cheers, Mark Mark Doyle Manager, Product Development The American Physical Society [email protected]
