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Date: | Fri, 4 Nov 1994 09:57:17 EST |
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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
[log in to unmask]
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