---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 23 Sep 1998 22:01:22 -0400
From: Albert Henderson <NobleStation@COMPUSERVE.COM>
Subject: Article: Free Internet Access to Traditional Journals (Rob              Atkinson)

on Fri, 18 Sep 1998 Rob Atkinson <atkinson@FNAL.GOV> wrote:

> FYI:  There is an interesting, well thought out article in the
> September-October 1998 issue of American Scientist, v. 86 no. 5, with title
> Free Internet Access to Traditional Journals, by Thomas J. Walker.  The
> author gives a brief history of scholarly publishing vis costs including
> the serials crisis beginning in the 1970s, the serials crisis Web-style,
> and continues with an example of a working scheme for cheap digital
> publishing and free access at a profit.  The piece is library oriented.  I
> apologize if it has already been brought up here.
> Available on-line at
> http://www.sigmaxi.org/amsci/articles/98articles/walkerweb.html

I read the article with interest. It contains many errors including
claiming that the first journal was published by a society and
that Federally financed page charges cannot be paid to commercial
publishers.

More important, I think that the author is a pawn in universities'
program of shedding the cost of their libraries. Administrators
rammed through a major reallocation of university spending based on
the idea of "resource sharing" and the success of Xerox. They cut
libraries from 6% to under 3% of university spending. The result
was the "serials crisis." They never got approvals from faculty
senates or the research community. Then they tried to blame publishers'
profits and excessive publishing by researchers. Now, based on the
Internet, they hope to cut libraries to less than 1%.

When the Copyright Act of 1976 was passed, the costs of the science
journal system were borne as follows according to Donald W. King et al.
in SCIENTIFIC JOURNALS IN THE UNITED STATES (Dowden Hutchinson, 1981)

         12% Authors
         14% Publishers
         10% Libraries and (A&I) secondary organizations
         64% Users

King's work on the economics of scientific journals was an enormous
undertaking, financed largely by the National Science Foundation at
a time when "dissemination" was recognized by science policy as
important. It gave us benchmarks like the distribution of costs
described above. I feel this is a key question.

My understanding of the allocation envisioned by Walker and others
who like author subsidized publishing and "free" access-not-ownership
would be:

                        30% authors
                        70% users

No publishers. No libraries. Probably little discernable difference
between validated and vanity publications.

Albert Henderson, Editor, PUBLISHING RESEARCH QUARTERLY
<70244.1532@compuserve.com>
.
.