RE: Open Access to Research Is Inevitable, Libraries Are Told

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

To be fair, there may be good reasons to employ grad students to 
help publish journals, among them the experience that they get in 
working in this environment that may help advance their own 
careers later. This is also true for university presses that use 
undergraduate student interns, as we do at Penn State; we 
consider it part of our mission to provide such learning 
experiences for students on our campus, and a number have gone on 
to careers in publishing. The costs of training them are absorbed 
by the Press, but they are real costs; our mission being not to 
make a profit, however, but to serve scholarship and contribute 
to education in other ways, we regard this as justifiable even 
though not strictly the most efficient way to run a business.

Sandy Thatcher


>Of course, there are always costs, with OJS or any other tool. 
>There is always a learning curve, etc. How it is absorbed is the 
>interesting thing. When a lot of people do it because they want 
>to make their journal(s) work, then the cost is no longer 
>monetized. Perhaps it would be good if people left the 
>perspective that all has to be analyzed in purely organizational 
>terms that canbe tallied by a good accountant. Doing so is a 
>useful exercice but it is not a guaranted path to the realities 
>out there...
>
>With regard to grad students, one has to make a choice: cheap 
>labor with rapid turn-over or more stable, but costlier, labor. 
>Again, there is no hard rule here.
>
>Jean-Claude Guedon