Jim Giles, Societies take united stand on journal access, Nature, March 25, 2004 (accessible only to subscribers). Excerpt: "Signatories to the Washington DC principles most of them US-based societies say they need publishing revenues to pay for everything else they do, from running conferences to educating the public. 'Any profit that we make goes back into the development of the next generation of scientists,' says Martin Frank, executive director of the American Physiological Society and spokesman for the group. The societies say they are responding to the launch of the Public Library of Science's first journal, PLoS Biology, last October. The free online journal generates income by charging authors $1,500 to publish a paper. But the societies say that the backers of PLoS failed to acknowledge that both traditional and open-access publishing can coexist. 'People were saying that PLoS was plotting the overthrow of the scientific publishing system,' says Frank....[Peter] Newmark [editorial director of BioMed Central] questions whether the societies should be channelling publication revenue into other activities. He says that grants and education programmes are valuable, but points out that the money ultimately comes from public sources. 'They're taxing the universities to support the societies,' he says." (Thanks to Alexei Koudinov.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/24/2004 11:00:00 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.
