On Sat, Oct 5, 2013 at 4:31 PM, Graham Triggs <grahamtri...@gmail.com>wrote:
In an author-pays model, the author is paying in part for the peer-review, > editing, > production, distribution - which are all replicable and comparable services > between > publishers, and in part the reputation of the journal they are being > published in > That's with pre-Green Fool's Gold. But with post-Green Fair Gold, the production and distribution and their costs are gone -- offloaded onto the global network of Green OA IRs. And the peer review costs are paid for as a service (most sensibly, a no-fault service for the review, regardless of outcome). And the reason you choose to be reviewed first by this journal is because of its track-record for quality (as reflected in its title). No extra charge. The editorial function of evaluating the submission, picking referees, and adjudicating the referee reports and revision is part of the peer review service. (There's not much else going on by way of editing and copy-editing any more anyway, with journals, hence nothing worth paying for.) Pre-Green Fool's Gold, with all that other stuff bundled in, can cost from $1000-$5000+ per accepted articles. My guess is that post-Green Fair Gold should cost around $200 per round of no-fault refereeing (because the costs of rejected or multiply revised and re-refereed papers will not have to be borne by the accepted papers only). The other downsides of pre-Green Fool's Gold (besides the price and needless extra products and services and their costs) are that it has to be double-paid by institutions (which must continue to subscribe to their must-have non-OA journals for their incoming content, and then pay Fool's Gold OA fees on top of that, for their outgoing content). If it's hybrid Fool's Gold, then their payments may even be double-dipped. Pre-Green Fool's Gold also has to be paid out of scarce funds at a time when research itself is underfunded and library serials budgets are over-stretched. The much lower cost of post-Green Fair Gold (for peer review) will be single-paid out of a fraction of the institutional windfall subscription cancellation savings. And it will all be fair, affordable, scaleable and sustainable. I can keep on repeating this as often it takes, until people begin to understand why it is premature and profligate to pay pre-emptively for pre-Green Gold. -- I've done it with other things before (such as the need for Green OA, Green OA mandates, Immediate Deposit, the Button, and the link to research evaluation)... Stevan Harnad
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