Peter Banks writes
> Thomas seems to assume that subscriptions and access are going away
> soon.
No, I believe they will persist. There will be areas of
academic work with open access and others with toll-gated
access. Where the borders will lie is not clear at this time.
Borders will be set by discipline, type of audience, or even
maybe something altogether different. We are fortunate to
be living at a time when the boundaries are drawn. 50 years
from now, they will be very hard to shift.
But to return to the initial debate: My argument was more
technical. You accepted Heather's argument that a bunch of
scholars could run a journal for free in their service time.
But you countered that they could not run a bundle
of say 1000 journal titles. My case is: why would they want
to do that?
> Thus, it isn't "central management costs" that make some titles of
> the large publisher more costly; it is rather the status (for profit
> or nonprofit) of the publisher and nature of the titles themselves.
This has been well documented in the work by Ted Bergstrom.
Cheers,
Thomas Krichel mailto:krichel_at_openlib.org
http://openlib.org/home/krichel
RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
skype id: thomaskrichel
Received on Wed Feb 21 2007 - 16:48:24 GMT