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

["Anthony Watkinson" <anthony.watkinson@btinternet.com>]

Is Professor Guedon really suggesting that publishers who spend a 
lot of money on online editorial systems, on editor honoraria, on 
editorial back-up costs and on editorial board meetings are 
really doing so because they want to increase their costs? The 
software he mentions may well work for small journals in the 
humanities but it is my understanding that it does not satisfy 
editors of biomedical journals or their authors:.

Anthony

----- Original Message -----
From: <jean.claude.guedon@umontreal.ca>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, February 24, 2010 11:43 PM
Subject: RE: Open Access to Research Is Inevitable, Libraries Are Told

> 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