[SystemSafety] Making Standards available to Standards Committees

[Peter Bernard Ladkin]

On 2016-05-12 09:53 , SPRIGGS, John J wrote:
> When we have sorted out standards, we could turn our attention to text books, which are also prohibitively expensive in many cases.

My 2001 Causal System Analysis book was accepted for publication by a major technical publisher.....
at a jacket price of about €100. They wanted me to sign over all rights.

It was a text for our System Safety course. No student would have bought it (here, most balk even at
€25). I declined the offer and kept it for free on our WWW site.

Bad political move. For university beancounters free books on WWW sites don't exist (I've come up
against that three times in four books). Yes, you read that right. Get a book published at a price
none of your students will pay, and you are evaluated as "productive". Put it up for free download
where your students can use it for a module you teach, and you are "unproductive".

I even had a colleague tell me to my face in 2011 that he couldn't find anything I'd published in
the previous five years (2007-11). Failing all else, he could simply have typed my last name into
Google.

Moral: Some business models are worse than those we've been talking about :-(

PBL
Prof. Peter Bernard Ladkin, Faculty of Technology, University of Bielefeld, 33594 Bielefeld, Germany
Je suis Charlie
Tel+msg +49 (0)521 880 7319  www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de





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