>Sociological Research Online is an electronic journal receiving funds from
>the UK's eLib program for three years, 1995 to 1998. After that date, the
>journal is expected to become self-funding.
...
>Your reactions to these ideas (which I should emphasise, are matters of
>ongoing debate within the Management Board, not settled policy) would be
>very welcome.
There have been some good replies to this question, particularly from
librarians advocating variations on the site licence approach. What it boils
down to, it seems to me, is find out what your customer wants, so what these
library replies are saying is important. In particular, price is crucial.
Somehow you need to find out what they will *actually* pay, and what they
will pay for. Don't overestimate sales, but if you underestimate your price
is likely to be too high, that's the conundrum.
Two general points may be worth making:
1. Make sure you are not undercapitalised, however small you think your
initial costs *may* be.
2. As soon as you attach a price to something your cost overheads go up,
that is, marketing becomes vital, and you need administration to collect the
money, etc. This would be easy for research projects to overlook.
In fact, one advantage of the' library consortium' site licence proposal is
that it could reduce this overhead, as well as offer some of the other
benefits, for buyer and seller, suggested in the earlier mail.
I could go on to say that I am not convinced that new e-journals such as
this, which are not very different from the familiar print models, are
exactly the type of product that the online community will want, so
ultimately the journal may have to go through some serious redefinition
before the above issues can be considered. OTOH, it can be said that such
journals are in a far better position to evolve to whatever form emerges
than some more traditional journals.
Good luck
Steve Hitchcock
Open Journal Project
Multimedia Research Group, Department of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK
Email: [log in to unmask]
Tel: +44 (01)703 594479 Fax: +44 (01)703 592865
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