Finding good models for publishing on the internet is difficult. Existing
publishers of academic journals have adopted mostly silly models where you
can get the electronic version for the same price as the paper plus a
surcharge of 10-20%. As publishing costs for academic journals are
increasing faster than inflation while their chief market, libraries, have
fixed or declining budgets the death of the paper academic journal is not
too far off.
The model below reported in EDUPAGE shifts the charges to the author rather
than the reader. For acadmic material I believe that this makes a great
deal of sense.
>
>ONLINE JOURNALS TAP AUTHORS FOR REVENUES
>At least two scholarly journals are forging a new business model for
>academic publishing: they're charging the authors, not the readers. Optics
>Express, a publication of the Optical Society of America, and the Internet
>Journal of Nitride Semiconductor Research, both have adopted the "pay to
>publish" strategy and distribute the journals free to subscribers. Optics
>Express charges $300 for an accepted article, and the Internet Journal
>charges $275 per submission, with a refund of $165 if an article is not
>accepted. Publishers acknowledge that the success of this approach will
>hinge on whether they can produce enough influential readers to make it
>worth the authors' while. The director of science libraries at Yale
>University calls it a "fascinating new approach to journal distribution."
>(Chronicle of Higher Education 6 Feb 98)
Tony
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