Dear all and dear Christian,

I completely agree that paper publication must not be a cause of
delays and restrictions on number of pages. In fact, the plan I
briefly described was based on quick digital publication, with the
printed versions coming afterwards as a secondary element.

The "printing on demand" is a nice concept, except that many printing
services require a minimum order of 5-10 copies, but this is probably
not a big problem.
Just to continue with the example I commented you, if we adhere to
such "printing on demand", the fees result as follow:
- Fee for EB members: About 20 Euros/year
- Fee for paper published: About 10 euros
- Printed copies: about 20 Euros.

And a point I didn't mention is that the economic model *scales*. I
suppose that the initiative of this Open-Research Society is to host
*many* journals as the BMC or PLOS (if I am wrong, please Miltiadis,
correct me :-)) so that the excedent in funding from one can be used
for other. However, I still think that the fee model is required,
since the cost of management of the digital journals (specially for
collections or journals) must be paid somewhat to guarantee
continuity!.

Regards,
Miguel Angel

--- In open-research-society@yahoogroups.com, "Christian Wagner"
<christian@w...> wrote:
> I too agree that a model with author fees is restrictive for the
> publication of research. I would even go further and suggest that
any
> "paper based" journal model stiffles research publication. In paper
> based journals, the marginal cost for every page printed is
considered
> and so an artifical scarcity is produced, resulting in a "pipeline"
> and publication delays.
>
> An open research model should better align itself with the
publication
> models of slashdot.org or kuro5hin.org, both of which have peer
> review, yet fast publication, and large readership. Both are
> electronic publication models.
>
> I would consider an alternate paper based model, where the
publication
> is essentially electronic, but authors could request (at their
cost) a
> "bound journal issue" (printing on demand) so that they can give it
to
> their Dean at the time of tenure decisions.
>
> If you have not seen it, the University of British Columbia offers a
> free software for the management of electronic journals. You can
find
> it at http://www.pkp.ubc.ca/ and it runs on a PhP/MySQL platform
> (either with Linux/Apache or with Windows + web server).