American Scientist on electronic publishing/journals

[Bernard Robertson-Dunn]

>From e-carm-news Aug 20

Title: Free Internet Access to Traditional Journals
Resource type: Journal Article
Date: Wed, 19 Aug 1998 17:53:28
Source: E-mail
Author: Thomas J. Walker
Keywords: E-PUBLISHING    ,ACCESS          ,COSTS/ECONOMICS
,IMPACT

I thought that some of you might be interested in the following
article
from the American Scientist on electronic publishing/journals.
It's
written by Thomas Walker, an entomologist at the University of
Florida:

http://www.sigmaxi.org/amsci/articles/98articles/walker.html

American Scientist
September-October 1998, Volume 86, No. 5

The verb "to publish" has special meaning in the scientific
community.
Scientific, medical and engineering research is paid for by the
public,
private industry or donors; the results, essential to the
advancement of
knowledge and the investigators' careers, are reviewed by peers
and
shared with the larger scientific community primarily through
their
publication as articles in journals.  Once published (the
copyrights
having been signed over by the authors), journal articles become
a
commodity that can be sold by publishers to a nearly captive
market:
university libraries. In recent years this market has
experienced,
ironically, both a proliferation of product and a dramatic
spiraling of
pricesthe prolonged "serials crisis" during which libraries have
canceled
subscriptions and forgone book purchases to pay for the most
essential
journals. In a world brimming with new knowledge and new ways to
find it,
there have appeared pockets of information poverty and local
hardship.

Bernie Sloan
Senior Library Information Systems Consultant
University of Illinois Office for Planning & Budgeting
338 Henry Administration Building
506 S. Wright Street
Urbana, IL  61801
Phone: (217) 333-4895
Fax: (217) 333-6355
Email: bernies@uillinois.edu

-- 
Oh! it is absurd to have a hard and fast rule
about what one should read and what one shouldn't.

More than half of modern culture
depends on what one shouldn't read.
-- Oscar Wilde

Regards
brd

Bernard Robertson-Dunn
Canberra Australia
brd@dynamite.com.au