Stevan Harnad writes
> Now the immediate occasion for this discussion thread was the recent $9
> million grant to the Public Library of Science for the founding of new
> open-access journals (i.e., BOAI-2):
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2517.html
>
> This is excellent news for open access
Maybe.
But is it good news for scholarly communication? Probably not.
They want $1500 per submission. We discussed that with the RePEc
community. A library would have to cancel one of the expensive
journal in our discipline for a year to fund one submission. Using
data from Ted Bergstrom, Bob Parks made a rough calculation
that if a library took all the journals in Ted's list, which
has many journals in economics and certainly the most expensive
ones, it could fund 42 submissions with the money that it
would save from cancelling all the submission, assuming that
it would buy all of the, no library does that. Now note
that these are submissions, not accepted papers. If they
have a high rejection rate, you burn all you money for
your serial budget onto trying to get into one of the
two journals. Noone except the very well-funded will be able
to publish there.
Can anyone tell me how an organization can cash in $9 Million,
over 5 years, and not be able to operate two, presumably
online, journals with this money without charging a submission
fee, for at least the time that the subsidy runs for?
Cheers,
Thomas Krichel mailto:krichel_at_openlib.org
http://openlib.org/home/krichel
RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
Received on Sat Dec 21 2002 - 19:27:24 GMT