Someone passed on to a message from his university library announcing that the journal “Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Computational Statistics” is no longer free.
Librarians have to decide what to do, so I thought I’d offer the following consumer guide:
|Wiley Computational Statistics journal||Wikipedia|
|Frequency||6 issues per year||Continuously updated|
|Includes articles from Wikipedia?||Yes||Yes|
|Cites the Wikipedia sources it uses?||No||Yes|
|Edited by recipient of ASA Founders Award?||Yes||No|
|Articles are subject to rigorous review?||No||Yes|
|Errors, when discovered, get fixed?||No||Yes|
|Number of vertices in n-dimensional hypercube?||2n||2n|
|Easy access to Brady Bunch trivia?||No||Yes|
|Cost (North America)||$1400-$2800||$0|
The choice seems pretty clear to me!
It’s funny for the Wiley journal to start charging now for access. Unless they can convince Wikipedia to (a) charge at least $1401/year and (b) introduce errors into their articles to level the playing field, I think Wegman’s journal is going to have difficulty competing in the free market.