[Q] How are we going to solve the economic issues that surround open access?

Well, that’s a problem that’s been around for a long time. I think I’ve said, I’ve talked about that before that it was a problem that basically came up when JD Bernal proposed the central repository idea for, you know, reprints. The traditionalists will be opposed to it. Probably some kind of hybrid will eventually evolve, but I see now that Sigma Xi just put out an announcement that they’re, about the idea of a, somebody, the current president, or somebody, wrote to me as a member of Sigma Xi – membership at large – I’m not a member of a Chapter because I didn’t get elected to Sigma Xi as part of a Chapter when I was at school or anything like that. I just, somehow I became a lifetime member of Sigma Xi by just joining as a lifetime member. And now they want to talk about a Sigma Xi journal of multi-disciplinary research, which is a kind of, it would be their brand of, Nature or Science, you know. They all along, missed the boat on things they could have done with their membership; they were relying on the American Scientist – it’s a nice little magazine, but it doesn’t, it doesn’t evoke peer view oohs and aahs, if I can put it that way. Whereas getting your stuff in Science and Nature, it does. Now they want to do this multi-disciplinary journal, and whether they succeed with it or not, I don’t know. But it’s, it’s not necessarily an open access one. Basically, the idea is to have things available free of charge to the public. That’s what they mean by really open access. It’s that people can get at it free. Whether people can get at things free or not, it’s going to happen in the next 10 or 20 years, I don’t know. I cannot easily see the publishing industry ceding multi-billion dollars in profits that they’re making out of, so called, value added, that they do. And open access means you replace that with what, volunteer work? There’s a new word they have, you know, this term they use for things like Wikipedia – there’s a... they call that... there’s a new term for that... it’s called, some kind of authorship, community authorship.

[Q] Collaborative?

Collaborative, or there’s another word. For work like, Wikipedia, I think that they, the arguments for and against it, we talked about that, a thing like Wikipedia and so on. It’s not properly authenticated; so unless you get things that are authenticated, they’re not going to be accepted, and you won’t get them authenticated unless they get people paid for doing the work that’s required. You can’t just get it out of volunteers. I don’t know. It depends. Within the professional society, you get an awful lot done by volunteers, if you think about it.

[Q] They’re going to list the author names, aren’t they?

Are they going to what?

[Q] The authors’ names... that was one of the proposals...

In Wikipedia? Well, yeah, well, I thought in the beginning they were going, doing that, but I could be wrong. I don’t mind having my name put on something if I’ve written it, or proved it, or whatever. But if you get a collaborative authorship - that’s the word – collaborative authorship; it’s when you do an article where everybody approves it one way or another.