Re: Napster: stealing another's vs. giving away one's own

From: Andrew Odlyzko <odlyzko_at_DTC.UMN.EDU>
Date: Sat, 30 Mar 2002 10:32:15 -0600

A (very) belated response:

  On Mon Mar 4, Arthur Smith (apsmith_at_aps.org) asked:

  My father (who lives in Canada and reads the Globe & Mail regularly)
  was just asking me about this article :-) I hope Andrew Odlyzko
  was misquoted on the "do the same thing for $100,000"! Perhaps he'll
  explain himself...

The precise quote from the Globe & Mail article by Stephen Strauss is:

  ... Another approach, and one that has already been
  extensively used in physics and astronomy, is to publish "pre-prints." In
  this case, papers that have been peer-reviewed but not yet published
  elsewhere are posted on a server site. University of Minnesota
  mathematician Andrew Odlyzko has argued that conventional publishing of the
  20,000 papers one such site stores a year would require an investment of
  $40-million to $80-million. The electronic pre-prints do the same thing for
  $100,000.

Note that I am not quoted directly. In fact, Stephen Strauss did not ask
me for such a comparison during our phone interview, but rather based this
passage in the Globe & Mail on my published articles, where, indeed, I do
cite Paul Ginsparg's archive as achieving very low costs, but where I also
make it clear that this is costs for archiving and dissemination only,
and is not "the same thing" that traditional journals do.

I hope this clarifies the issue.

Andrew



  -----Please note new address-----

  Andrew Odlyzko
  University of Minnesota
  Digital Technology Center
  499 Walter Library
  117 Pleasant St. SE
  Minneapolis, MN 55455

  odlyzko_at_umn.edu email
  612-624-9510 voice phone
  612-625-2002 fax

  http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko
Received on Sat Mar 30 2002 - 22:54:41 GMT

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