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Parts of computer science are not too bad either. In my field, AI, the top-tier journals and conferences are all open-access and run by nonprofits. I mention co
by mjn 9y ago
Parts of computer science are not too bad either. In my field, AI, the top-tier journals and conferences are all open-access and run by nonprofits. I mention conferences because in computer science they are important as well; the top peer-reviewed conference proceedings are as important as journals.
* The top two journals are probably JMLR (machine learning) and JAIR (AI in general), both open access and run by nonprofits. No publication charges either.
* The top two general AI conferences are AAAI and IJCAI; the top two machine learning conference are ICML and NIPS. All four of these publish open-access proceedings (including archives of past proceedings) and are run by nonprofits.
Of course this didn't happen entirely by default, it's taken some effort over the years. AAAI has always been nonprofit, but its digital library has not always been open access. And in machine learning, the top journals used to be run by the Elsevier/Springer duopoly, which was solved in the early 2000s by 40 editors of Machine Learning journal, which included a large proportion of top researchers in the field, resigning en masse to start an open-access alternative: http://www.jmlr.org/statement.html http://www.jmlr.org/statement.html
- soulbadguy 9y agoThe resignation letter is actually a great read. I think the author summarized the situation quite well : "We see little benefit accruing to our community from a mechanism that ensures revenue for a third party by restricting the communication channel between authors and readers."
- FabHK 9y agoSimilarly, the editorial board of the Journal of Algorithms stepped down in unison and started the ACM Transactions on Algorithms, in protest against Elsevier, back in 2003. Don Knuth, founder of the JoA, had a hand in it. Wish this happened even more often - without the scientists (and the prestige/impact factor endowed by the scientific community), the publishers have nothing. Don Knuth's letter (typeset in TeX, of course) is well worth a read [1], and since then the situation has only gotten worse, I think. Ceterum censeo Elsevier esse delendum. [1] http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/joalet.pdf http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/joalet.pdf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACM_Transactions_on_Algorithms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACM_Transactions_on_Algorithms http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~hal/jalg.html http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~hal/jalg.html