[LINK] Open access publishing not a threat to research grants

[Tom Worthington]

At 10:57 AM 1/29/2007, Glen Turner wrote:
>Tom Worthington wrote:
>
> > Perhaps some indicator is needed to show those articles for which
> > authors have paid to have published. ...
>
>IEEE and ACM publications usually ask for money. ...

I hadn't realized they charged.

ACM charge US$60.00 per page and they say paying is not a condition 
of publication 
<http://www.acm.org/pubs/surveys/Authors.html#PageCharges>. So the 
average paper of eight pages would cost $US480. One IEEE conference 
has an "additional papers payment" of $200 for the first four pages 
and $100 per page for more.

>What you are seeing here is a bunfight between the ARC and the 
>universities about if open access publishing is part of the 
>'infrastructure' (and thus not funded by ARC grants) or not. ...

It would seem very clear to me that publishing the research should 
count as part of the cost of doing the research.

>I suspect it will be a cold day in hell before the libraries, which 
>have had their budgets slashed for
>twenty years now and can barely afford to replace wobbly chairs, 
>willingly give up any funding.

If the Librarians would stop being the poor handmaidens to 
publishers, they could make some serious money. There is no reason 
why the university libraries can't provide publication services to 
the university and collect the revenue from this. It seems bizarre 
that universities will allow their authors to write stuff, pay 
publishers to publish it and then pay the publishers to be able to read it.

If the universities are going to go to the trouble to set up a 
pre/post print electronic archive, they might as well slap an ISBN 
and some workflow software on it and produce their own journals (much 
as ACS has done with the ACS Digital Library 
<http://dl.acs.org.au/>). It is easier to create the e-paper from 
scratch in your own journal system than try and enter a pre/post 
print from a commercial publisher.

For the "scholars workbench" system the ANU is building I have 
suggested skipping the step of converting word processing documents 
from authors and instead have the authors type their papers directly 
into the publishing system via the web. The metadata and the content 
will then be neatly filed in the system by the author (if they don;t 
do it they will not get their paper published).



Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
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