Quote Originally Posted by SWJED View Post
... it will be for pay. The Gazette is owned by the Marine Corps Association - a non-for-profit. That said, if it were for free there would be no Gazette - not sure what your point is??? Not everyone is as gracious as Bill and I - free magazine and forum - with hundreds of hours and bucks invested. Hmmm...
"put it out of your mind...."

There's a lot to be said for charging for content, like being able to buy food . However, there is also a lot to be said for making content free. A lot of academic journals are moving towards one of three revenue generation models:
  1. pay for all
  2. totally free
  3. mixed

The pay for all model relies on selling electronic subscriptions to libraries or via associations (e.g. as a member of X you get Y number of "free" subscriptions). It does generate revenue, but it is also monopolistic in a way that makes it hard for non-members to ever get involved without paying exhorbitant amounts of money.

Many journals are mvoing towards the "totally free", i.e. an open source model using the creative commons licence. The well organizaed ones rely on donations, advertising and/or grants to make money, and some have been quite successful. A totally free model allows a lot of poeple to access the content and become involved in the community of interest.

From a rough count, most journals seem to be in sometype of mixed format, where there is a for pay component, usually the current years, and back issues are free. A variant on that is something like Nature which also has "special articles" that are free.

All of these models have their own strengths and weaknesses that can usually be expressed as a trade-off between trying to generate a predictable amount of money via subscriptions, vs. building a community of interest.

Back to the Marine Gazette for a moment. It has been free and is now moving to a pay model. That will significantly reduce the readership and, probably, cut into the afvertising revenue (if any). It will also mean that it will be hard for academics to access it and send their students to access it. Okay, I admit that there is a chunk of self interest there, but it will change the access dynamics .

Marc