RE: Monopolies in publishing

[Jan Velterop <jan@biomedcentral.com>]

Terry, You're absolutely right. In physics, articles do seem to exist in
two places. But they're not exactly the same. In Archiv, they are
preprints without a journal 'label sown into them', and in the journals
they obviously have this 'label'. The biggest puzzle to me is, too, why do
large numbers of librarians fork out often substantial sums, basically
just for the labels. Maybe the labels are worth it. Perhaps one of the
librarians on this list might want to comment.

Jan

-----Original Message-----
From: Terry Hulbert
To: jan@biomedcentral.com; liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Sent: 7/11/03 6:44 AM
Subject: RE: Monopolies in publishing

I've been lurking too long, and I know I'm going to hate myself for
doing this   :-)  But here's an interesting thing. What you say is
logically and theoretically correct, but we don't live in a world of
logic and theory. In the world of physics what you're suggesting doesn't
quite stack up - researchers have access to articles on the pre-print
servers, they're heavily used. So, in fact, an article (or at least
something approaching an equivalent) can and often does 'exist' in two
places. And a large number of institutions still subscribe to physics
journals. Why is that?

Terry Hulbert
Institute of Physics Publishing