On 15 Jan 2004, at 14:20, Gherman, Paul M wrote:
> There is another payoff to the practice of charging for all
> submissions, that authors will less likely to breakdown their
> articles into multiple smaller publications to add lines to their
> resume.
When I first started lecturing, a professorial colleague suggested that
the advantage of keeping his department's old and slow computers was
that the delays in running and compiling programs gave the students
more time to think about what they were doing. Needless to say, this
argument didn't win the day, because there were other genuine pressures
which required the students to use faster computers.
I find myself in a similar position (as an academic) contemplating this
justification. It's not the publishers' leniency nor the authors'
academic profligacy which causes the "salami slicing" of our
publications. There are other (irresistable) pressures further up in
the system, and trying to address this phenomenon by erecting a pricing
barrier downstream is more likely to harm progress towards Open Access
movement than cure the ills of academia (in my humble opinion.)
---
Les Carr
Received on Thu Jan 15 2004 - 14:51:55 GMT