Re: Stop fighting the inevitable - and free funds for open access!

[Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

Sandy Thatcher is quite right. It would be so much more helpful 
for OA if its advocates would stop speculating about funding and 
focus on facilitating the practice of PA provision.  -- SH

On Fri, 26 Jan 2007, Sandy Thatcher wrote:

> As a publisher (of journals as well as books) and as co-director
> of the Office of Digital Scholarly Publishing at Penn State,
> where we are developing with the support of a Mellon grant
> jointly with Cornell an open-source journal publishing platform
> known as DPubs, I find this a peculiar calculation of the cost of
> operating a journal. Surely, Heather Morrison knows better than
> to suggest that it only costs $509 to run a journal even using a
> "free" open-source system like OJS.  Then what is the purpose of
> making such a claim, other than providing more propaganda for OA,
> denigrating further the Elseviers of the world, and trying to
> fool some people who may not know better? If we are going to
> engage in rational discussion of the pros and cons of OA, we need
> to get beyond simplistic analyses like this.
>
> Sandy Thatcher
> Penn State Press