Ed Zalta has kindly written a reply to the “sugggestion I made yesterday”:http://tar.weatherson.org/archives/002861.html about how to fund the Stanford Encyclopedia.

bq.. We’ve considered Brian’s suggestion. It is a good idea, and worthy of analysis.

At present, it is on the list of things we could try to do if our current plan of raising money through the libraries and independently through Stanford doesn’t work out. That list also includes selling directly to publishers sponsored links to their books, to be placed in a special section of each entry, and designated as such, so that readers won’t be misled.

But I hope you can appreciate why these fall into the category of ‘Plan B’. (1) The SEP is part of the open access movement in which information and research should be free. This goes against that grain, since it would be helping publishers who charge for access to academic research, the same publishers to whom authors give away their copyright and who then turn around charge those same authors for the right to see information they gave away. (2) Wouldn’t people wonder whether this commercialization undermines the academic integrity of the enterprise — one could think of scenarios where the transactions aren’t innocent, especially if the process of going through the SEP entry bibliographies and creating links from books to booksellers couldn’t be automated. (3) Our income would be variable each year. If we don’t make enough off booklinks one year … oops there go the funds needed to pay the editorial assistant 8 of the 20 hours/week, or there goes the new server we need. Bad idea.

I could probably think of other reasons.

We’re not ruling it out as a temporary way to make ends meet. But, in the long run, an endowment keeps everything much steadier and maintains academic integrity at the highest possible level.

p. These all seem like good points to me, so rather than getting into an argument over details, let me just take this as another opportunity to plug the Encyclopaedia’s “fund-raising drive”:http://plato.stanford.edu/fundraising/.