RE: Publishing papers from conferences

[Jewish Music Institute <jewishmusic...>]

Re publishing papers:
We are considering several ways of publishing papers from the recent 
international
conferences on Jewish Music in London.  I would be interested in list members 
comments
regarding web publishing and payments for these.

If we published in the usual way on hard copy, we would have to pay for 
printing and the
proceedings may be for sale say for £20

If we publish the papers individually on the web, people have a choice of 
reading the
abstract and choosing which papers they want to read.  Then for a small fee 
they can
have them sent and download them.  The conference is an expensive exercise to 
mount.
Even to publish on the web articles have to be edited and someone needs to 
prepare them
and post them and monitor requests.  I don't see that the results of this 
administration
and scholarship should be available entirely free of charge. There can be 
sliding scales
possibly, for more that one article the price could come down say £4 for one 
article,
£3.50 each for two £3 each for three and £20 for £10 or more.  In this way too 
we value
the scholarship and make it available to bona fine readers in the same way one 
might do
with a hard copy publication.  There could be a lower price for students 
possibly.  I
think it is ethically wrong to make it available completely free.  But that 
begs the
question as to do we owe the writer anything, or are we disseminating their 
work in a
responsible way in a scholarly publication, such as they would expect from 
submitting a
paper for a conference.

I would be interested in list members responses, either on the list or to me 
direct.

Geraldine

Geraldine Auerbach MBE
Jewish Music Institute
School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London
P O Box 232, Harrow, HA1 2NN
Tel 020 8909 2445   Fax 020 8909 1030
E-mail jewishmusic (at) jmi(dot)org(dot)uk
Website www.jmi.org.uk



Geraldine,
Just to reply to your item on Jewish music news letter, I think it is a
great idea to publish the conference but to ask for a small fee would make
the lectures inaccessible to people who are not scholars but merely
interested (such as myself). I am sure there are tens of lectures that
I/people like me would be interested to read but a charge puts this out of
reach.





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