[GOAL] Re: Is $99 per article realistic and compatible with, profits - or too high a price?

[Editor Living Reviews]

I'd just like to add the point of view of the Living Reviews OA journals 
with an example why we currently argue in favor of CC-BY-NC.

First, since not only Marcin Wojnarski doubts that

> anyone want to pay for a paper which is elsewhere available for free?

Our long review articles would make perfect (text-)books if anyone could 
sell them without asking for publisher's or the author's permission. 
Example:

The open access review "The Post-Newtonian Approximation for 
Relativistic Compact Binaries" (http://www.livingreviews.org/lrr-2007-2) 
was republished by Oxford UP as a major part of "Equations of Motion in 
General Relativity" 
(http://oxfordindex.oup.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199584109.001.0001) 
in 2011.

Original price at amazon.com: $98.50 for 156 pages!

Of course, this example does not completely illustrate the possible 
misuse of CC-BY: here, the author agreed to the commercial reprint, and 
the original review was extended by other authors' contributions. 
However, they could have easily sold only the Futamase part as a book.

With CC-BY, the publisher would not even have to ask the authors or 
original OA publisher for reprint permission. Moreover, the authors (who 
usually write time-consuming reviews in addition to their publicly 
funded research) would not financially benefit from this commercial 
reuse in any way. Therefore, our authors would object to Peter 
Murray-Rust, who has

> never met a scientist who has argued for CC-NC over CC-BY.

In short, in a world where companies collate wikipedia articles and sell 
them on amazon, why wouldn't there be a marked for commercial OA reprints?

(And, if someone wants to sell them, e.g., as book-on-demand, at least 
it should be the OA publishers and authors themselves...)


Frank




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Frank Schulz | Managing Editor
Living Reviews BackOffice

MPI for Gravitational Physics
(Albert Einstein Institute)
Am Muehlenberg 1
14476 Potsdam | Germany

email: editorlr at aei.mpg.de
tel: +49 (0)331 567 7115

http://www.livingreviews.org
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