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RE: Interlibrary loan and electronic journals
As i see it, right now publishers survive by selling subscriptions for everything that gets into their journals. All of it may (should) be of scholarly quality, but most of it is read only only by the author(s), reviwers, and copy editor. So you are really buying dozens or hundreds of articles for the 1-2 you really want. For a good journal in science this comes to $500 + per useful article. Go to a fee for each article makes sense in some ways, but when publsiher xyz decides to charge $1000 for each each article (knowing they will sell very few), what will people do? Publishers have a certain overhead and try (or do) make a profit. Divide the number of subscriptions by their desired income and you get the price of a current journal. Divide the number by a few articles and you get a higher number. Of course, if this was the real world, there would be downsizing and cost cutting so that there was not the need for a high level of income to produce the same profit. But we are dealing with 5 year olds who want their way, don't listen, and know everything (i.e, scholars who feel they need to publish in a high price journal or perish). One of these days someone will have to tell them to grow up before they bankrupt the libraies of this world. Steve Heller, USDA, ARS, Plant Genome Project Bldg. 005, Room 337 Beltsville, MD 20705-2350 USA Phone: 301-504-6055 FAX: 301-504-6231 E-mail: srheller@gig.usda.gov WWW: www.hellers.com/~steve
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