Donald Kennedy, Vantage Point: Subscription journals are here to stay, Stanford Report, February 26, 2004. The Editor-in-Chief of Science defends toll-access journals, in a counterpoint to the Pat Brown piece (see previous entry). Excerpt: "Science and many other journals published by scientific societies use a different business model [from the OA journals]. Scientist-authors pay nothing to have their papers submitted, reviewed, edited and published, save when there are color figures. Neither do they pay to have their work covered in our news or 'This Week In Science' section. Instead, the costs of publication are met from several sources: membership (all AAAS members receive Science, but their dues cover that and a variety of other AAAS programs); institutional subscriptions or site licenses for the online version at 1,000 institutions; and advertising. Thus our model should probably be called 'open submission.' I think it is a good thing that we will now have both models in play. PLoS has made an impressive start, with good papers, and there is every reason to wish them success. Interestingly, both ways of making scientific results available to the community are facing real challenges. Ours is that we are already making so much of our content free to readers online that there is a dwindling incentive to subscribe to the print version....Since print advertising is a major part of our revenue stream and since it is linked to circulation, that's a problem for us....I hope we will see a productive competition between the Science and PLoS publication models. But I know of no normative standard by which theirs or ours can lay special claim to the moral high ground."
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/26/2004 03:56:00 PM.
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.
