Robert:
 
          I agree wholeheartedly with your posting about resources on
          the Net and others which are being sold. I actually don't
          object at all to the Witt's policy of selling their
          information. It was more that I was struck to see an
          announcement of a new information resource on the Net that
          wasn't a gopher or web site.
 
          I had a good long talk with the director of our publications
          program (which is the largest non-university botanical
          publication program in the world), about all of these
          subjects. Apart from her instinctual mistrust of the Net and
          of digital publishing, which comes from years of paper
          publishing, she made many of the same points about the
          implications of "refereeing" and therefore the validity of
          print journals vs. electronic postings. But that is an
          artifact, not integral to the medium. In other words, there
          is no intrinsic reason that electronically published and
          disseminated journals could not have the same authority as
          print journals. It's just that they don't now because of the
          Wild West nature of the Net (bless its pointy little head).
 
          So, the critical question for her, and for other publishers
          of scholarly journals, is "how can we find the money to
          sustain our efforts if we make it accessible for free." And
          there is no more reason that they should than that the
          people who sell gasoline should give it away. So, believe
          me, I am very sympathetic with the need to get money for
          things such as the Witt finding aid, I am just fascinated by
          this aspect of the information evolution.
 
 
          Eric Siegel
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