[Taxacom] Paywall our taxonomic tidbit

[Stephen Thorpe]

Eric has made a valid point, but not the same point that I was making. Eric is talking about the financial burden of open access on authors who don't have public funding, so must spend their own money. I was talking about the potential waste of public funding on open access fees for publications which are only of interest to a few specialists. A few specialists paying (public money) for access to publications (if they can't get them free from the author, etc.) probably spends a lot less public money than the authors of those publications paying up front open access fees set by publishers at rates highly "optimistic" of the likely readership interest.

Stephen


--------------------------------------------
On Thu, 14/1/16, metzlere at msu.edu <metzlere at msu.edu> wrote:

 Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Paywall our taxonomic tidbit
 To: taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
 Received: Thursday, 14 January, 2016, 3:02 PM
 
 Stephen wrote" Perhaps you have set
 this for me as bait? If so, so be it. Often authors pay for
 open access using public funding rather than their own
 personal money. Then the question becomes whether or not
 that is an appropriate use of public funding, and a whole
 raft of thorny issues become relevant."
 
 I will rise to the bait.  As a person who must pay page
 charges from his household budget, with no institutional
 support of any kind, not even access to a lab, it is a
 serious problem.  It is not a matter of publish or
 perish.  It is a matter of living on a pension and
 publishing at all. 
 
 Maybe some remember the broo ha ha of auctioning a moth name
 last Autumn - that was me. I never saw any $$, yet we did
 raise a bunch of money for a worthy charity supporting
 research in the US National Parks. I'm still looking for a
 suitable answer, $$ for publishing a paper or $$ for Mrs.
 Metzler to get just the right shoes so she feels that she
 looks good.  You decide; both my wife and I are biased.
 
 And the beat goes on.
 
 Cheers from sunny southern NM where I will be blacklighting
 for moths early next week.
 
 Eric
 Eric H. Metzler
 Alamogordo, NM US
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