Go for tiered pricing and become a pariah - or not?

["Janet Fisher" <jfisher@pcgplus.com>]

Learned Publishing - Issue 1 - 2011

>From the Editor:

Go for tiered pricing and become a pariah - or not

Want to switch to tiered pricing for your journal - perhaps 
because you  think it's fairer, and even expand your market at 
the 'low' end? Want to  get it totally wrong and bring down the 
wrath of all, clog up the  listservs with complaints and maybe 
lose significant revenue?Not that I'm suggesting that that's 
happened recently, of course. But we  do have an article in our 
latest issue that might just help you get it  right. Charlie 
Rapple explains in detail, based on a real-life example,  all the 
steps you have to take to help give you the best chance, at 
least, of getting it right.

Your editor, in his normal iconoclastic fashion, manages to get 
mention  of sex, or homosexuality, in his editorial on scholarly 
communication.  He would have done it more, he says, but was 
terrified in equal amounts  of being thought either homophobic or 
too interested in the topic.We do get quite scholarly ourselves 
in one paper, which reviews the  literature on the ethics of 
'peer review'. If you look up 'peer review'  on the search 
engines, you'll get thousands of apparently relevant  items, so 
even finding out how Lawrence Souder from Drexel chose what to 
review is interesting, and the whole 18-page paper with its 136 
references should be something of a benchmark for those 
interested in,  and researching on, this topic.

There's an awful lot in medical journals about how to deal with 
research  on humans - but how do we do, as a publishing industry, 
when it comes to  animals? Nikki Osborne, from the RSPCA, has 
done some more research, and  finds us sadly lacking - have a 
look at her findings.

David Nicholas and the CIBER people are back again, measuring 
away as  usual - fascinating stuff - this time looking at two 
years' use of  e-journals by researchers, and even suggesting 
that some of the  traditional library role has moved away to, as 
they call them, 'the new  librarians' - check out to see who(m) 
they are talking about.

Cliff Morgan of Wiley has a nice and short piece just explaining 
the  mysteries and complexities (in case you thought there 
weren't any!) of  the Creative Commons Licence.

Eefke Smit tells us why all of us need to care more about 
preservation  of data (broadly defined) and results from the 
PARSE project -  otherwise, as she says, we might be in for a 
'Digital Dark Age for  Data'.

And then we have book reviews, and a couple of comments on an 
earlier  article just to give you, we hope, a compelling package. 
Can you resist?  (all right, I know the answer to that - but 
don't try - give in to  temptation).

Alan Singleton

Editor, Learned Publishing

editor@alpsp.org

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Janet H. Fisher
North American Editor, Learned Publishing
Publishers Communication Group
875 Massachusetts Ave., 7th Floor
Cambridge, MA 02139 USA