RE: Deposit Mandates as part of Publisher Services

[David Goodman <dgoodman@princeton.edu>]

I congratulate Sandy for a honest, concise, and definitive 
statement of the reason why the present publication system does 
not serve the interests of scientific authors, and why academic 
publishers, as they now exist, are harmful to the interests of 
science:

> for [our authors], greater distribution,
> even illegal distribution, is a bonus.

The interest of an author of research journal articles is in 
distribution. Whatever system does it most effectively is 
preferable. The most efficient system in terms of both universal 
distribution and low cost is an arXiv-like system with 
superimposed peer-review; the best proposal remains that of 
Varmus, ten years ago, for exacly that. 
<http://www.nih.gov/about/director/pubmedcentral/ebiomedarch.htm>

It would of course reduce the industry of scientific journal 
publishing to operating the computer systems that track peer 
review and maintain the archives. The obvious commercial 
interests of the journal publishers prevented its adoption then, 
abetted by a government more interested in sponsoring corporate 
enterprise than in promoting science and education.

Perhaps by now scientists realize that publisher interests are 
not the same as ours; it has long been technically possible for 
us to ignore journal publishers altogether, and we could do it of 
our own accord. A journal cannot publish without manuscripts. We 
can review by ourselves, as we have always done, and we can 
certainly archive by ourselves, as we already do.

The money libraries spend would be much better used for the 
production of monographs in the humanities. University presses do 
that very well, their main problem being that not enough money is 
available, for so few libraries have funds to buy them after 
purchasing the scientific journals.

David Goodman, Ph.D., M.L.S.
dgoodman@princeton.edu


----- Original Message -----
From: Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>
Date: Thursday, March 27, 2008 8:59 pm
Subject: RE: Deposit Mandates as part of Publisher Services
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
...
>. Our authors would generally not be motivated to sue
> to protect us against piracy; for them, greater distribution, 
> even illegal distribution, is a bonus.
>
> Sandy Thatcher
> Penn State University Press