There are no news from my article but this: Springer was at least fast enough to send me an invoice of 2.433,55 EUR! That's the amount of money necessary to retain the copyright of my text and get the fabulous number of 25 offprints.

By the way: I really like the concept of open access. Scientific work should be open to anyone, but to what price?! 2.000,- EUR to get open access to a text I wrote by myself, I submitted by myself, I edited by myself after peer review (which is also a gratis service of scientists to the publisher)? Springer calls that Open Choice, I'd call it hell of a good way to make money!



Just run a stupidinconvenient electronic system for article management, find some desperate scientists who will write articles and some others who do the review work, hire a layouter who is able to create pdf-files and you may start earning money.

Most of the time it will be tax payers money you earn. And if you think about it, it's paradox: public pays us to do research and in the end public pays again to read, what we did with their money! Sometime I think about starting an internet based open access journal. It's the only way to escape this vicious circle.

Meanwhile, I personally have some profits from paying to Springer (though I don't even know, where to organize the money for the bill from): I'm now an official member of the Springer online journal contributer community! That doesn't only provide me with a discount of 33% on Springer books but with an electronic system that keeps sending me thousands of emails again!

the ESS, the electronic submission system, or whatever publishers call their systems where you're supposed to upload your manuscripts, is the natural opponent of the scientist. At least "my" ESS used to be. Promising "Quality, Rapidity, Transparency" it gave me a really hard time, when I tried to put in my manuscript.



As it wasn't hard enough to write a scientific article, publishers push you to the border of your resilience by using the most inconvenient online systems I've ever seen. When I submitted my abstract, the ess was clever enough to save three different copies of it. Which I didn't notice at all. But then the ESS started sending me automated e-mails, reminding me that some (!) of my submitted abstracts are incomplete. And yes: it's a real communicative system sending me messages every day, informing me about this and that and sometimes even about the status of my manuscript.

First I found that kind of annoying but after some mails I got used to it. It's almost like getting holiday mail from friend traveling abroad: You don't pay too much attention but you're pleased to hear from them...

But then something happened to my ESS: It stopped talking to me! Shortly after my manuscript was accepted for publication the ESS didn't want to talk to me anymore! That was in December and the last message I got was this:

Dear Author,

We are happy to let you know that the revised version of your above noted paper has been accepted for publication. You will receive the pre-layouted paper within a period of 7 days.

Best regards,
Submission Editor

That doesn't sound like a good-by-message to me! And when the 7 days deadline elapsed I was worried. Since then I'm checking the ESS every day, at least once, but the only thing I get is the pleasant message that I made it, I passed the review process, I succeeded.

I only have to wait for the layout and log on to the ESS once a day. It feels like being deserted by a friend. Should I call the publisher and ask if everything's all right with my dear ESS?