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 Cost (UK) £986-£1972 £0 Cost (Europe) €1213-€2426 €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.