RE: PNAS Introduces Open Access Publishing Option

[Steve Hitchcock <sh94r@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

At 21:09 27/05/04 -0400, David Goodman wrote:

> The best resolution of the dispute about whether the cost of a journal
> should be supported from the producer/author/sponsor side or the
> library/consumer side, ought to be for them to share the cost.
David, How would this work? I don't see how it is possible in the longer
run. You can have either, i.e. green journals (consumers pay, authors
self-archive) or gold journals (producer pays), but sharing the costs is
not sustainable.

The model PNAS has adopted might be sharing the costs between producers
and consumers, for now, but it is an interim measure, which PNAS says is
an experiment. It could only be an interim measure for any journal.
Further, it only applies to journals with a print version, and I would go
further still to suggest it will only work for the highest quality
journals. But ultimately this approach allows journals to evaluate whether
they should be green or gold, and both are perfectly valid from an Open
Access perspective.

Steve Hitchcock
IAM Group, School of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton SO17 1BJ,  UK
Email: sh94r@ecs.soton.ac.uk
Tel:  +44 (0)23 8059 3256     Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2865