You know journal costs are out of hand when...

All right, so this is a bit off-topic, but it amused me.

During my grad school days, I was part of the Stanford Digital Library Project (wow, that was a blast from the past--those pages are essentially unchanged in structure, information architecture, even content, since I was the webmaster for the site in 1997...) Part of the purpose of the project was to improve access to online information, focusing on search and retrieval protocols (in one of the bigger unsung successes of government funding, the NSF-funded "Digital Library Initiative" sponsored the research that eventuallly turned into Google). Another aspect of the project that I worked more closely on was different business models for online content and providing flexible IT systems for managing access and payment collection, also known as shopping models (see the text of the paper).

At any rate, this is all background to a citation on the web today for someone apparently thanking me in a journal that I had no recollection of submitting to, refereeing for, etc. So I was curious enough to follow the pointer:

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Note of Appreciation from the Editors
Source: Computational Intelligence, November 1999, vol. 15, no. 4, pp. 3-3(1)
Publisher: Blackwell Publishing

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Aha! A 1 page note of appreciation from the Editors. I wonder how much it costs? I scrolled down a bit farther and found:

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The full text article is available for purchase
$38.40 plus tax

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