From: antonio regla (areglac$##$yahoo.com)
Date: Sat May 27 2000 - 12:59:49 EDT
Dear Members:
I have seen great interest in the subject of scientific information and would like to contribute my opinion on the subject. I agree with most of the opinions that have been given, that the cost of scientific information is very high, and the raw material is provided by the authors for free. True, however authors benefit from publishing their work, they do it to promote their careers, and not only to share information with the scientific community. Many articles will be useful to someone else doing research in related areas, while other articles will not be as useful, I believe a measure of the usefulness so to speak is provided in some kind of citation index where authors can find out how many other scientists have cited their work. One has to consider that journals are a business, because they are not funded by any government agency, they have to hire people to process the submitted articles, to have someone send articles over to referees for review, and finallly print them into a hard copy to be sent out t
o subscribers. It is very understandable that journal publishers need to make money to stay in business. We are living in capitalistic societies where all human activities are done for profit, and I don't see why we should wonder why publishers do it. Unless they were funded by the government there is no other way for them to stay active other than selling their product. If authors don't want journals to charge so much they should send their publications to free of charge electronic journals, but then, it wouldn't look as good on their resumes to have published in these type of journals. To me, it is easy to understand why things are the way they are. Because we all have contributed one way or the other to make them that way. So why complain now? Let's hope we find new ways of sharing information. Best of luck to everyone.
Sincerely,
Antonio Regla
---------------------------------
Do You Yahoo!?
Kick off your party with Yahoo! Invites.
__________________
ORGLIST - Organic Chemistry Mailing List
Website / Archive / FAQ: http://www.orglist.net/
List coordinator: Joao Aires de Sousa (jas$##$mail.fct.unl.pt)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Fri Sep 19 2003 - 12:15:34 EDT