Bradley Efron, Are Print Journals Obsolete?AmStatNews (membership magazine of the American Statistical Association or ASA), October 2004. Excerpt: "All of this concern about print journals could be dismissed as airy academic hand-wringing except for one fact: the ASA depends heavily on its journals for financial support, and, more seriously, for membership....This year the ASA has a task force examining the issue of electronic publication, under the experienced leadership of Karen Kafadar....One possible action concerns arXiv, an electronic repository for paper and preprints. (Imagine a CIS where the entire article is available.) Begun in the physics community a dozen years ago, arXiv now serves a wide range of mathematical disciplines. Recently a physics friend complained to me how inaccessible the statistics literature seemed without an arXiv culture. Maybe this won't be true for much longer. The Institute of Mathematical Statistics now plans to place all Annals papers in arXiv for universal access, and the ASA is considering following suit. The goal is to encourage a thriving arXiv section for statistics (probability is already up and running) where everyone would deposit preprints as well as published material. ArXiv doesn't seem to have put the physics journals out of business, but it seems likely to undercut their primacy as reporters of the physics scene." Bradley Efron is the president of the ASA. (PS: ArXiv is an excellent option for the ASA and would have the least disruptive effect on its journal. Efron's article includes some discussion of the NIH OA plan, but mistakenly concludes that its purpose is to punish expensive journals and their publishers; the primary purposes are to accelerate medical research and give taxpayers, including researchers and physicians, access to the research they have funded.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 10/15/2004 07:49:00 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.
