Dear Otto,
At 8:38 +0100 8/03/06, Otto Spaniol wrote:
Dear Guy and all,
In the long run, it makes little sense to have a TC6 journal published by an official publisher like Springer. In 4 years from now, IFIP and Springer may have no agreement any more. If our journal is published by Springer, what shall we do?
It is a fact that we discussed in Poland the possibility of having a TC6 journal published by Springer!
We discussed and concluded not to do it, if my recollection is correct.
My impression is that this was just one of our numerous nonnsense discussions.
Probably we all like nonsense in TC6, otherwise we wouldn't be there! :-)
I think we should look for open access solutions (for the TC6 journal AND the IFIP DL). This is the only reasonable way.
Do you think Springer could accept the idea of a fully open access journal (at no cost for authors and no cost for readers) with copyrights retained by authors? If so, we may not close that door.
If somebody wants to discuss with Springer about that, please do so. I wish him or her good luck. Springer will probably ask this person whether she lives in this world or not: no cost for authors and no cost for readers but probably "some" production cost for Springer. Who would compensate for that? Springer has to pay the employees etc. The dream of financing everything by advertisement (this might be also in the background of the above proposal) is more than questionable.
According to this argument, no open access journal would exist, right? As this is obviously not the case, we are living in this world too!
I agree that the business model is a tricky issue, but hopefully solvable.
Springer may not be the solution that we want; however, several TC6 delegates have already expressed that they would be happy with such a suboptimal solution. Furthermore: "I you don't get what you like you will have to like what you get".
There is no point in having a poor TC6 journal that we are forced to like. I'd prefer no TC6 journal at all and publish our papers in existing renowned journals. There is too much noise in scientific publications already: too many events and journals without any impact, just to allow second class researchers to have some lines on their publication lists. I guess the future of TC6 is NOT to be the "second (or last) choice" for publications.
The only way to make a breakthrough in this old-fashioned publication world is to set up a quality networking journal which is open access before anyone else does. Are we afraid of pioneering anything? Do we always want to sell our souls to greedy publishers?
Best regards, Guy
Best regards Otto