I would like to suggest that the American Institute of Physics and the American Physical Society consider adding their journals to the list of prestigious publications whose contents more than six months old are available online for free (see, for example, http://www.highwire.org/lists/freeart.dtl). Some of us have access to AIP and APS publications, but many do not because of the cost.
In my opinion, this free online access would not cause a drop in journal subscriptions. Those of us who publish in AIP and APS journals need current issues, so we will not cancel our subscriptions if we have free access to older issues.
I have great difficulty gaining access to nonphysics journals; scientists in other disciplines have similar problems accessing physics journals. Free access to scientific publications encourages cross-disciplinary research, but commercial publishers will not be the ones who take the first step.
Blume and Brodsky reply: The American Physical Society and the American Institute of Physics would like nothing better than to have our journals available without charge, not only after six months, but immediately. There are, however, very real costs for the peer review, composition, production, distribution, and maintenance of the online journals; these costs must be met and someone must pay. At present, our major source of revenue is subscription charges, with author page charges providing a much smaller part of our income. (An examination of Joaquim Fort's list of "prestigious journals" that make their content available after some time shows that the majority are medical journals, which have the possibility of significant income from pharmaceutical advertising, which is not available to us.) As not-for-profit societies, we cannot run the risk of losing subscription revenue, which would likely follow from making our journals available without charge after six months.
Beyond material published online since 1995, APS and AIP have also been putting their earlier content online: APS, back to the beginnings of Physical Review in 1893, and AIP, back to 1985, with publications back to 1975 scheduled to go online this year. Substantial costs are involved, which must be covered. These back-files are available at very affordable prices by subscription or modest fees for single articles. We believe this fee structure makes the material easily available to cross-disciplinary researchers. If we made these files of earlier articles available without charge, then someone--presumably the subscribers to current content--would have to pay extra. The entire community must cover the cost of distributing physics research results. If we do something that reduces charges for one group, we must raise prices for the others.
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