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

[<jean.claude.guedon@umontreal.ca>]

Indeed peer-reviewers do their work for free, at least in the 
case of journals, and there exists excellent free software to 
manage the peer review process (for example John Willinsky's 
OJS). But publishers continue to treat this as if it were 
sooooooooooooooooooooo expensive and soooooooooooooooooooo 
difficult.

The main point of all this is that significantly digitization 
lowers a number of expenses and, as a result, many tasks 
previously out of reach for small groups are now quite easy to 
organize. There are costs involved in publishing, to be sure, but 
many are never monetized, and they are not as high as some 
estimates claim. Look at what SciELO is doing and with how much 
money, and then ponder... As a result, the perimeters within 
which publishers used to work are gradually shrinking, raising a 
number of professional anxieties that interfere with the clarity 
of the objectives - namely developing the best communication 
system possible for researchers.

Jean-Claude Guedon