Open Choice Singular Limits.

[Richard Feinman <RFeinman@downstate.edu>]

Q: What's worse than biting into an apple and finding a worm?
A: Finding half a worm.

Michael Berry, in a wonderful, if serious physics, 
(self-archived) article in Physics Today ( 
http://www.phy.bris.ac.uk/people/berry_mv/the_papers/Berry341.pdf 
) carries the old joke a little further:

Discovering one-third of a maggot would be more distressing 
still: The less you find, the more you might have eaten. 
Extrapolating to the limit, an encounter with no maggot at all 
should be the ultimate bad-apple experience.  This remorseless 
logic fails, however, because the limit is singular.

If open choice publishers provides a subscriber discount for 
issues that contain open access articles, then, of course, the 
more such articles published the greater the discount until, in 
the limit of all open access, subscribers will be paying a very 
low price, indeed.  Of course, now everybody besides the 
subscriber will also have access but that really doesn't change 
the savings to the subscribers.

In the apple case, as Berry explains: A very small maggot 
fraction (f << 1) is qualitatively different from no maggot 
(f=0).

So there are singular limits in journal publishing too.  Or are 
there? RF

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Richard D. Feinman, Professor of Biochemistry
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