Date: Thu, 18 May 2006 14:14:20 +0530 From: Sukhdev Singh <esukhdev@gmail.com> 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 <mailman@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in> wrote:

Date: Wed, 17 May 2006 18:00:11 +0530 From: Chandrima Roy <croy@docdelserv.com>

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