Re: Nature Questions

[Lloyd Davidson <ldavids@northwestern.edu>]

What Nature is mostly worried about, I think, is not that current
subscribers will cancel their subscriptions.  Most faculty subscribers at
major research institutions, after all, probably pay for their
subscriptions out of their research budgets so subscription is relatively
painless.  What Nature mainly is worried about is that easy and free local
access to their full contents will provide a disincentive for students and
post-docs, their next generation of subscribers, to sign-up.  They may be
right.

Nature is like Science and Cell in that it depends heavily on personal
subscriptions for its economic health.  Journals that depend primarily on
library subscriptions for their income, such as Brain Research, have less
to worry about from providing campus wide access along with the library
subscription.

If we can't come up with a good business model that allays the concerns of
publishers like Cell and Nature, I don't know how we can expect them to do
it.  There are no easy answers to this dilemma and while Nature's solution
is abhorrent to all of us, and probably self defeating, I don't really
know what to suggest to them as an alternative.  If anybody has any good
ideas, I would love to hear them.

Lloyd

__________

At 05:49 PM 3/13/2001 -0500, you wrote:
>It has always puzzled me that publishers of excellent readable journals
>assume that every subscriber will immediately cancel their subscriptions
>the moment they have some other source for the material.  It almost seems
>that the better and more readable the journal, the more drastic the
>publisher assumes the cancellations will be.
>
>I seem to think more highly of the quality, desirability, and readability
>of Nature than its publishers do. It's a wonderful journal, and all its
>parts are of consistent excellence--that's why I'm being so concerned
>about it.
>
>David Goodman
>Princeton University