Re: [LIS-Forum] Open Access Journals?

Date: Thu, 18 May 2006 14:14:20 +0530 From: Sukhdev Singh Who bears the cost of the author's intellectual inputs?!! The same should bear the cost of author's publication. What is reported in scholarly journals? -- Research output. Who does that research? -- Scientists / Scholars. And Scientists / Scholars get salary for that. They need infrastructure to work in. They work on Research Projects that cost money. Who bears all the cost? Publication costs are just a fraction of the total cost of the research output. So it makes sense to spend a bit extra to expose the research results, gain maximum impact of it and build ground for further research. So funding agencies ( Govt. or Others) need to spend little extra to publish the research / project outcome which they sponser. Public funding agencies have their publication wings - they just need to allow free / open access to their publications. Atleast to their online versions. Indian Council for Medical Research is an example which provides free access to their journal - Indian Journal of Medical Research. Well there are other models as followed by BioMed Central and PLoS. Advertising revenues could be other. Don't we have Free-to-Air TV Channels? Hey! Do we pay for listening to FM Radio Channels? - Private or Public. I would suggest - --All publications consuming public money to produce should be publicly accessible - at least their online versions. --All publicly funded research should be mandated to be open-archived by the author with in a time frame. --All teaching / reseach institutions should set-up their institutional repositories. --Sukhdev Singh, NIC. http://openmed.nic.in On 18/05/06, Mailing List Manager wrote:

Date: Wed, 17 May 2006 18:00:11 +0530 From: Chandrima Roy

Fine, it sounds great when we talk about free access of Journals. But there are lots of technical issues involved in online conversion of Journals, e.g. necessary format to decide - HTML, XML, SGML, etc., get them converted accordingly, data checking and proof reading, maintaining quality of images, pagination, necessary indexation of Journals, build a complete searchable platform for users,.a complete project. This also involves a cost, which someone has to bear. Hence, please justify the statement and let us understand who should bear the cost?

Chandrima Roy