On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 8:02 AM, Jon Mendel <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Simon P J Batterbury wrote:
>>
>> 5) A further issue is author costs. 'Open' journals are increasingly
>> charging authors, since they have no subscribers. J of Maps charges 50 quid
>> per article, and Environmental Research letters charges US$1900 unless you
>> can claim an exception. One in my field, Ecology & Society
>> http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/ , charges "US$750 for the first 5000
>> words and US$100 for every 1000 words thereafter", which means I won't be
>> submitting anything there at the moment!
Simon: who's behind these journals? Are these for-profit publishers
attempting to make a profit on the "open access" wave?
If you restrict yourself to electronic online publishing (and why
not?), costs have to be pretty minimal; some small hosting fees, and
periodically paying a designer to keep the thing looking nice and
up-to-date. That certainly doesn't justify charging authors.
> This also raises issues about how to respond to/critique an article in a
> journal, and the possibilities for debate to take place within a journal's
> (virtual) pages. Anecdotally, I know of at least one instance where
> researchers were put off from submitting a response to a journal article (in
> another discipline, with higher author costs) because it would have been
> extremely expensive to do so.
Wow; kind of seems to defeat the purpose.
This is where the traditional print model fails.
Open access (and even non-open online) publishing should include
within it a flexible
notion of commenting. That should probably borrow from the blogging
model, where you have two models of commenting:
1) the comments form at the bottom of the article; good for short
comments or questions
2) trackbacks: you write your response as a separate article on your
own blog, and it gets automatically linked from the commented article
You can see an example of a post that contains both at Global Higher Ed:
<http://globalhighered.wordpress.com/2009/04/06/debating-the-possible-decline/#comments>
There's also been some interesting work on allowing commenting at the
paragraph level.
<http://www.futureofthebook.org/commentpress/>
Bruce
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