Interesting discussion; thanks for including me. And kudos to the
ESA.
A comment about page charges being paid to not-for-profit publishers:
I don't know what government agencies support the work of the
Entomological Society and am prepared to believe that some of them might
pay page charges *only* to not-for-profits. That policy used to be true
for the National Science Foundation, but as far as I know, NSF changed
in early 1994, to say that page charge monies paid out of NSF
grants/contracts could be paid to *any* type of publisher.
This represented a major change for them, and it was controversial. The
proposal had been floated a year or more before that -- it first showed
up as a short announcement note in the Federal Register -- and various
of the members of the American Institute of Physics groups, in particular
the American Geophysical Union (AGU) mounted a campaign to the NSF. I
think this campaign slowed the new policy for a while. The argument
that the AGU made was that they were committed to the mission of their
scientist members and tried to keep prices down, and this mission/
philosophy should be preserved. The American Physical Society (APS),
made no public representation to NSF but various folks did say privately
that a level playing field for all publishers might not be a bad thing
for various reasons.
Again, I don't know that this has any relationship to biological
sciences, but you might want to double check the page charge policy where
the funder is NSF.
Ann Okerson/ARL
ann@cni.org
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