Cost of Journals

["Peter B. Boyce" <pboyce@aas.org>]

Shirley Lambert may leave readers a wrong impression about the power of a
well marked up electronic article. The beauty of an article marked up with
logical tags in SGML is that it (along with it's associated DTD) _does_
carry all the information needed to derive the printed pages
automatically. So, if one starts by producing electronic manuscripts in
SGML, one _can_ (and we do) produce the paper version virtually
automatically. At the same time we have the robust archival format which
can be translated automatically and thus maintain the archive at very low
cost. It is this latter capability which should be of great concern to
librarians (in addition to price) as they negotiate with publishers.

If you only start with HTML, which is what Shirley may be thinking of, you
get neither page production nor easy and inexpensive archival maintenance.

Peter B. Boyce

P.S. Thanks, Ann for posting my message on costs. I used the wrong return
address...

_____________________________________________________
Dr. Peter B. Boyce                                                
Senior Consultant for Electronic Publishing              
American Astronomical Society                              
http:www.aas.org/~pboyce	pboyce@aas.org