Re: Correction (RE: Thatcher vs. Harnad)

["Joseph Esposito" <espositoj@gmail.com>]

Barriers to authors are a good thing, not a bad thing.  While no 
one would want a system where only the rich can publish (which is 
not the case today) or only the rich can read (which is not the 
case today), I would think no one would want a system where any 
author (poster?) can lay equal claim on our attention.  The 
question is how to apportion attention.  The current dominant 
method, the user-pays publishing world, for all its flaws, does a 
good job in allocating attention. Its assumption is that people 
will measure the allocation of attention by the amount of money 
they choose to spend on objects of their attention.  Thus 
publishers compete to have the most attention-worthy products. 
You pay attention to what you pay for.

I cancelled my subscription to The Economist not because I can't 
afford it but because I don't have the time to read it.  It 
competes with everything else I have to read, a list that 
continues to grow. The Economist is a very good publication, but 
not good enough, at least to me.  I stopped reading it when I 
began to subscribe to Peter Brantley's READ 2.0 mailgroup.  I had 
to choose, but not because of money.  Brantley could charge three 
times the price of The Economist and I would still subscribe.

The image promulgated by some open access advocates is a world of 
researchers with time on their hands.  They have nothing to 
occupy themselves with since they can't get access to everything 
that is published, everything that has been published, and 
presumably anything that would be published if publishers weren't 
such nasty SOBs who like to say no.  What's better, a doubling of 
accessible materials or an added hour in the workday to review 
materials already available.?

Joe Esposito

On 6/28/07, David Prosser <david.prosser@bodley.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
> > Except to the degree that it raises barriers to publication for
> > authors -- which, of course, it does.
> Except, of course, where there are no author fees (in the case of
> over half of the journals listed in the DOAJ), or where the
> authors fees can be waived (BMC, PLoS, etc.).
>
> (Incidentally, I always find it intriguing that open access
> publication fees are described as barriers to publication, but we
> rarely hear the same being said of page charges, colour figure
> charges, etc. for publication-based journals.)
>
> David C Prosser PhD
> Director
> SPARC Europe
> E-mail:  david.prosser@bodley.ox.ac.uk