downloading fees

[Judith R. Cohen <judithc...>]

Hi, I'm a bit divided on this issue.NAturally, I want to disseminate
knowledge/ideas, but  I do NOT, as an author, want my work that easily
available on the web, or I would have put my writing up for general free
perusal long ago. On the other hand, two of my articles are already are
there, in  electronic journals (Continuo Magazine: Early Music; and the
Spanish-Portuguese Ethnomusicological Association). I'm not thrilled
about those but they already existed as electronic publications and they
are not widely accessed - no one's ever told me they've come across them
in the 2-3 years they've been up. In the long run, I still don't think
the benefits of relatively-instant web publishing outweigh my the
reservations about it -I write for certain audiences, and like the
feeling of knowing they are - basically - the ones who read it and also
who are unlikely to misuse the material, cite it improperly in their own
disseminations, etc. - there are no guarantees but after all, we have a
general idea of who is likely to read certain journals and publications.
As for payments - it's bad enough we rarely, if ever, are paid for the
hours we put into the articles we publish and the papers we deliver, but
at least there is a certain satisfaction in appearing in certain
publications (and I LIKE having non-downloaded offprints to hand out,
and  comfortable little printed soft-cover volumes with my byline in
them...) without making it worse by universal free accessibility without
requirements for responsible use.  Judith

---------------------- jewish-music (at) shamash(dot)org ---------------------+