APPENDIX 57
Memorandum from the Physiological Society
The Physiological Society, as a member of the
Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers, supports
its response to this inquiry. In addition to this, the Society
would like to explain its own situation regarding its contribution
to the physiological community.
The Physiological Society is a learned society
and a registered charity, and publishes two scientific journals.
Unlike our sister society in the USA, we have no submission fee
or page charges for authors and the majority of the funds obtained
from subscriptions to the journals is therefore required to support
the editorial and publication process. The remaining income from
journal subscriptions is returned to the Society to support the
charitable goals of the Society, ie promotion of physiology through
supporting scientific meetings, assisting public understanding
of science and recruitment of scientists through our publications
for schools. The Society also assists the training of young physiologists
through postgraduate workshops and specialist courses. It is only
able to support all these other activities through the income
derived from the journals.
The Society has approximately 2,000 Members
from around the world but the membership rate is not sufficient
to cover these other activities, and there are no other ways to
raise revenue for this dissemination of information to which the
Society is committed. Other learned societies are undoubtedly
in the same position.
The Society is, however, committed to open access
as far as is possible and one year after publication we allow
completely free access to our electronic archives. We also allow
immediate free access to institutions in designated developing
countries.
Loss of income from journals subscriptions would
have a severe affect on the Society to fulfill its charitable
goals or indeed publish the journals at all without charging the
authors significant submission and page charges. In our view this
could deter submission of good papers from those scientists who
do not have sufficient resources.
February 2004
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