R. Ramachandran, 'We have to be able to recover our costs', Frontline, January 17, 2004. An interview with Martin Blume, Editor-in-Chief of the American Physical Society. The whole interview is on OA issues and worth reading. But here are a few excerpts:
[RR] What is your reaction to the recently launched open-access journal PLoS Biology of the Public Library of Science and the basic philosophy of PLoS? Does the APS subscribe to the idea of free access to its archives and current issues of journals?
[MB] We would very much like to be able to provide open access to our journals. Again, we are not for making loss. We have to be able to recover our costs. The Public Library of Science --let me characterise it this way-- is open-access to readers but is toll-access to authors. We are the other way around. We are open-access to authors but toll-access to readers. Only one of our journals has page charges or article charges and that is Physical Review Letters and there it is essentially voluntary....But if we went to open access for readers, we have to recover the costs in some other way. We have to charge somebody for it and there would still be a problem.
[RR] Has the Ginsparg e-print archive impacted the APS journals in any way?
[MB] We make use of it. We mirror it as you know. We were the first mirror in the U.S. We use it for submissions, for example. We link to it so that if people refer to an article [in the e-print archive], we link to the article. Authors can post their articles in the e-print archive in advance of submission. In fact, we make use of that. We send the referee to the e-print archive [for downloading and refereeing]. It saves us money. In addition, we allow the final (published version) to be posted on it so that whatever is published is there. It is a form of open access. Most of the articles of high energy physics get into the e-print archive. Still this does not stop people from submitting because they want the peer review and the peer-reviewed version to be read. So, to answer your question, it has not impacted and it provides us with the benefit.
[RR] But has open access to the e-print archive impacted your subscription base?
[MB] Not that we can see. In point, this is a consequence of our collection of articles and a consequence of the fact that the e-print archive has things going back 10 years perhaps, growing during that time, but before that it is only the APS archive containing everything that we published since 1893.
(Thanks to Subbiah Arunachalam.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/19/2004 08:06:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
