Glad to see that they are catching up to the rest of the publishing
world! The next question is: will I see free access in my lifetime?
(I'm currently 43. The early line from Vegas is 10-1 against.)
John
Why should you see free access? Does the daily paper appear in your yard if
you don't subscribe? Does your cable or Internet provider not require a check
every month or so? Does Aspen Research give away its reports for free?
" snipped-for-privacy@aspenresearch.com"
wrote:
require a check
Surely the daily paper, cable and ISP
service is _not_ in any direct way
supported by government dollars. I
doubt Aspen Research figures into the
equation, here.
IMHO, if someone wants to make an
argument either way, they need to
show that a properence of the reports
published by the ACS are privately
supported or government (Fed. or
State) supported. Restricted or open
access arguments follow the results.
Pretty simple stuff, folks. Complications
are added by thieves/parocites/fools.
.
.
..Mark (More Condi Rice anyone? Hot sauce? :-)
.
.
Could you provide the link the asbtracts are available? ACS is very
unfriendly to non-suscribers, especialy they don't even allow searching
their articles (not even titles). Free search is limited to only last
four years of publications. Why don't they think the free searching
would *increase* their readership? Naturally an interested vistor after
locating the article would try obtain the paper either by purchasing
(too expensive $ 25) or from the library.
Other competing journals such as Angew. Chem. do allow the visitor to
search and read the abstracts. Why ACS behaves monopolistically? Is it
because the publishers are more interested in $ than in education.
And my compensation when I review a paper for them is ...? I'm not
going to rehash as the arguments on either side. You are well aware of
them. PNAS is agressively moving towards free access, and the issue is
on the table for all other publishers. The trend is clear, it's just a
matter of timing.
John
My biggest complaint has been that since the abstracts are unavailable,
I've been very risk-averse about ordering an article for $30+ unless I
am very sure that it is what I want. The title is hardly ever enough
to really inform you of the nature of the work. Maybe they thought
that they were making more money from people ordering just based on the
title, but now have realized that that is not the case. I'm not sure.
Again, it is a step in the right direction.
John
The problem with that approach is that most work is now international.
As Americans, we may feel we have an entitlement to research supported
by American tax dollars, but we cannot have the same entitlement to
work supported by French tax dollars, or Indian tax dollars or ...
Trying to control the resulting patchwork would be a nightmare.
Proceedings of the National Acadamy of Sciences is moving towards open
access by charging the authors. That solves the issue immediately. I
suspect (or probably more correctly, I naively hope) that if this
approach were taken across the board, there might be an increase in the
quality of the publications, as publishing papers that are of little
importance would get to be an expensive proposition. "Rheological
Characterization of Polyolefins, Part LXXII"
John
several daily papers have FREE softcopy on the Internet. **>Glad to see that they are catching up to the rest of the publishing
*>world! The next question is: will I see free access in my lifetime?
*>(I'm currently 43. The early line from Vegas is 10-1 against.)
*>
*>John
*>
**Why should you see free access? Does the daily paper appear in your yard if
*you don't subscribe? Does your cable or Internet provider not require a check
*every month or so? Does Aspen Research give away its reports for free?
Hello John and All!
" snipped-for-privacy@aspenresearch.com" wrote:
An editorial in Angewandte Chemie at the end of last year had a good
discussion on the topic of open access to scientific journals. It's a
good read regardless of your standpoint in this issue. I even think it's
open access :-)
P. Gölitz, Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 44 (2005) 4-7.
Yep, and that's their choice. It's also their choice if they choose not to
have free access. Requiring them to allow free access, or berating them if
they don't, is wrong.
Page charges were instituted by many journals 30 or 40 years ago. It was widely
disliked by authors, especially (but not
only) when they had to pay the charges out of their pockets or out of limited
lab funds. It didn't take long for the
journals to drop it. There was discussion of this more recently, and the
charges would have to be several hundred dollars
per page to make up for the income lost from journal subscriptions.
Who is charging page charges these days? As I just said in another posting, it
is an old idea that didn't turn out well when
it was tried. And, do government grants cover publictaion costs?
In my mind, what would make sense is for CA to make available conversion
from CA compound number conversion into standard names. Then, they could
make abstract numbers available at a low cost with actual abstracts
available at a reasonable cost payable with a credit card.
Bill
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