A couple of minor typos – my surname is Russell and the organization I work for is ALPSP. [CS: Thanks, corrected]

Also, a couple of misunderstandings in your synopsis of my talk as follows:

It is just my opinion that authors should have the absolute right to self-archive the “pre-peer-review” version but not the post-peer-review version. Many, many publishers (both commercial and non-profit) do allow the self-archiving of the post-peer-review version.

With respect to the cost of “mixed read-pays and author-pays models”: During a transition to a fully author-pays model then I suspect that there will be some duplication of costs. What I would expect is that the subscription spend would decline (in terms of reduced subscription prices and / or reduced numbers of subscriptions) as the spend on author-pays increases more or less in line with this. The real issue is that the money will probably come from different sources (I can’t see a direct change from library aqusition budgets to libraries paying author-pays fees). Bare in mind too that in ‘hybrid’ journals the author-pays fees are usually subsidised by the subscription income and in any case most of the author-pays fees currently seen in the market are not representative of actual costs and the reality of author-pays fees will – in my opinion – be generally higher than those seen now. I suspect that the author-pays system would be no less expensive over all, but possibly with additional benefits…

To correct another point, what I actually said was that there are no cost savings to be had from electronic publishing per se unless there is no need to produce any print editions at all.

Finally, I guess that it is a matter of opinion as to how innovative publishers have been. They have certainly invested an awful lot in technology in the past ten years including online content delivery systems (that by far out featured those that came directly from academia at the time) that have delivered huge benefits to readers and manuscript submission and tracking systems that have delivered huge benefits to authors.

Best wishes, Ian

(BTW, it’s Robert Kiley not Kyle)