> That's very interesting. If anything, librarians should be most
> knowledgeable about the problems afflicting the publishing industry.
> Perhaps there's some academic tunnel vision going on.
There *was* some academic tunnel vision going on. The librarians now are much more conversant on the challenges of electronic publishing. Let's keep in mind that electronic publishing was a untested thing up until the past few years. AAAS took a big chance on the sitewide access model, which Nature never followed.
> As some background, my major current project here (at nurun, which is a
> subsidiary of Quebecor) is developing an automated publishing system, and
> it has a budget of several million dollars - which will probably swell.
> That said, it'll probably make its cost back inside a year or two, but
> still. This kind of thing requires a lot of money up front, and most
> magazines are anything but cash-rich.
>
> Science, to go online, wouldn't need this kind of system (although if they
> wanted to automate the entire production, they could probably use it). But
> a print-to-web interface would certainly cost some big bucks.
They have their own system which they've developed in conjunction with Highwire magazine. Highwire is an electronic publishing project at Stanford which hosts dozens of STM online magazines.
Here's a little secret about electronic publishing that I noticed during my tenure at AAAS. One of the significant costs in electronic publishing is all the overhead that is required to keep the information "not free." We're talking programmer time, staff time, and customer service salary. Didn't we have a discussion here several months ago about how the New York City tranist authority would actually SAVE money by not collecting fares? This is one of the things that this digital anarchist has noticed over the years: those who have to restrict access for fees or intellectual property reasons are spending more time and money than I am making stuff available at no cost.
<< Chuck0 >>
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