Readers talk back to CEN editorial, "myth of open access"

Open Court, Chemical & Engineering News 82(12), 4, 43 (March 22, 2004,) (access restricted to subscribers,) contains three responses to CEN's earlier editorial "the Open Access Myth" (see earlier postings.) Roald Hoffman calls the editorial "disappointingly negative" and says "it sounds like the automotive industry in its days of fighting catalytic converters." He calls on ACS to figure out a way to get to open access rather than trashing it. Dana Roth, a librarian at Caltech, however, points to the comparatively reasonable pricing of society journals, providing per-page cost data which favorably present ACS journals, and seconds thoughts of ACS President Charles P. Casey, who, in an earlier editorial, urged chemists to make changes from within and not submit to or review for exhorbitantly-priced journals. Finally, Irvin Levy says that ACS and others "exacerbate the divide between the information haves and have nots by the electronic distribution paradigms currently in vogue." He gives the example of his own subscription to an ACS journal which he let lapse and no longer has access to the electronic version for the years for which he subscribed. Irvin suggests as an alternative the model followed by many publishers: making the back issues free after an embargo period.