On 15 Jan 2004, at 14:20, Gherman, Paul M wrote:
There is another payoff to the practice of charging for all submissions, that authors will less likely to breakdown their articles into multiple smaller publications to add lines to their resume.
When I first started lecturing, a professorial colleague suggested that the advantage of keeping his department's old and slow computers was that the delays in running and compiling programs gave the students more time to think about what they were doing. Needless to say, this argument didn't win the day, because there were other genuine pressures which required the students to use faster computers. I find myself in a similar position (as an academic) contemplating this justification. It's not the publishers' leniency nor the authors' academic profligacy which causes the "salami slicing" of our publications. There are other (irresistable) pressures further up in the system, and trying to address this phenomenon by erecting a pricing barrier downstream is more likely to harm progress towards Open Access movement than cure the ills of academia (in my humble opinion.) --- Les Carr
