Sci Journals, authors, internet

[Greg Newby]

On Mon, Jun 10, 2002 at 10:53:05PM -0400, Steve Furlong wrote:
> 
> On Monday 10 June 2002 22:20, Jim Choate wrote:
> > On Tue, 11 Jun 2002, Jason Holt wrote:
> > > copyright issues?  Why haven't I seen other papers published on
> > > usenet and such before going to press?
> >
> > ???? This is a joke right?
> >
> > Copyright, they want it as the exclusive distributor which they can't
> > do if it's been published somewhere else.

Some electronic journals, some conferences and some print journals
now let authors retain copyright or, if they keep copyright,
allow authors to do what they please with their work.

It's far more typical, though, for the journal to get all rights,
except perhaps classroom use (aka "fair use") by the author.

> Which is especially impressive since some journals not only wanted the 
> authors to basically give up their copyright but wanted the authors to 
> pay for publication.

(And then charge the author's institution a fortune to subscribe
to the same journal.)

I think that there are still some journals iwth these "page charges,"
in which the employer or (more likely) some grants are expected
to pay for publication.  This was prevalent in the sciences, not
arts and humanities.

I never had to pay any, but information science (me) is more like a
social science than a hard science in many ways.

I *have*, this year, been told that a journal would be happy to
publish my screen shots in color for a few $thousand per page,
but would do them in B&W free.

> My experience with scientific journals is more than a few years old. Do 
> any of youse have personal experience with publishing both several 
> years ago and recently?

Not much has changed, other than continued price rises and consolidation
in the publishing industry.  Ejournals are making in-roads, especially
in some fields, and are breaking some patterns.  Print publishers are
working to "extend and embrace" some of the new models.

Meanwhile, academic libraries are undergoing a continued "serials
crisis" where the price increases in print journals far exceeds
any other cost.  There was (maybe still is?) a boycott of some
Elsevier products for some of their more eggregious pricing.

  -- Greg