19 ms·

ACM signed letter opposing open access

265 points by beefhash 7y ago

justinclift 7y ago
It looks like the ACM General Elections are coming up, with several officers and various other positions being available: https://www.acm.org/elections/acm-council/2020-slate https://www.acm.org/elections/acm-council/2020-slate It's likely worth someone contacting each of the nominees to publish info on where they stand on the Open Access issue. With that, the general ACM members who vote should have a decent ability to affect the ACM's future directions on this issue. :) That is assuming not 100% of all nominated people are against Open Access. Could be a bad assumption though. :(
- qpiox 7y ago
  Due to ACM protecting American business interests in cases such as this, as a member I give priority to people not from USA and if there is a choice, people not from EU. Most researchers from USA and EU do not understand that $15 per paper for reader access is way too much, that $99 for professional access is way too much, that SIG groups should not organize events in USA only, and when they organize event they should choose places that well connected to most of the world, and that do not have too strict visa requirements for researchers visits to scientific events.
  - kick 7y ago
    To be fair to the ACM, they do have cheaper rates in developing countries: $99 won't apply to you if you're outside of North America or Europe. Still a profiteering organization, but they've thought this out a little.
denzil_correa 7y ago
I have been a reviewer for (Computer Science) journals of publications like - Springer, Elsevier, IEEE, AAAI and ACM. The reviewer doesn't receive any money for reviews. The editing is entirely taken care by the authors of the paper.
tasogare 7y ago
Yesterday I had to deal with copyright to have a conference paper published by ACM. Open Access was charged 700/900$ based on my membership. The two others options was transferring all the management rights (keep dreaming), or giving them a license that basically allow them to do whatever they want anyway. I took the last option but I was angry: this is basically blackmailing me against my carrer path to get my work for free and make money on it. And I had to do all the bullshit job of dealing with templating, which should be done by the publisher. Hopefully my personal page is well indexed in Google Scholar when searching for my name, so anyone can get my articles for free.
- a3_nm 7y ago
  The license option is worse than you say: it's an exclusive license, meaning that not only can they do whatever they want, but you can't even do whatever you want anymore (distributing the article, etc.).
  - tasogare 7y ago
    Oh ok. I was sure there was shenanigans like that but my speciality is not law. It’s lion’s share clauses all way down.
- qpiox 7y ago
  @tasogare If you are an ACM member, you can use the Authorizer service to enable free access to your papers. The service creates a special link that you can use on two web-sites - for example your institutional web-site and your personal web-site, so that visitors to your web-site, will be redirected to PDF download of your papers. This effectively allows open-access to your papers, as long as you have a web-site.
  - tasogare 7y ago
    I’m not. And after that I don’t plan to be one. From what I understand they "grant" me the rights to publish my preprint paper on my website. Which I planned to do anyway. As a UE citizen living in Asia I would have done so anyway, good luck for them suing me over my own work in a foreign jurisdiction.
boulos 7y ago
The letter isn't that long, and I find the press release less useful than the full text. It's also signed by many more publishers than just the ACM. > Dear President Trump: > The undersigned organizations represent the leading publishers and non-profit scientific societies in the United States. We write to you with deep concern regarding a proposed policy that has come to our attention that would jeopardize the intellectual property of American organizations engaged in the creation of high-quality peer-reviewed journals and research articles and would potentially delay the publication of new research results. The role of the publisher is to advance scholarship and innovation, fostering the American leadership in science that drives our economy and global competitiveness. As copyrighted works, peer-reviewed journal articles are licensed to users in hundreds of foreign countries, supporting billions of dollars in U.S. exports and an extensive network of American businesses and jobs. In producing and disseminating these articles, we make ongoing competitive investments to support the scientific and technical communities that we serve. > As noted above, we have learned that the Administration may be preparing to step into the private marketplace and force the immediate free distribution of journal articles financed and published by organizations in the private sector, including many non-profits. This would effectively nationalize the valuable American intellectual property that we produce and force us to give it away to the rest of the world for free. This risks reducing exports and negating many of the intellectual property protections the Administration has negotiated with our trading partners. > We write to express our strong opposition to this proposal, but in doing so we want to underscore that publishers make no claims to research data resulting from federal funding. > To be clear, publishers both support and enable “open access” business models and “open data” as important options within a larger framework that assumes critical publisher investments remain viable. Under a legacy regulation that is still in force today, proprietary journal articles that report on federally funded research must be made available for free within 12 months of publication. This mandate already amounts to a significant government intervention in the private market. Going below the current 12 month “embargo” would make it very difficult for most American publishers to invest in publishing these articles. As a consequence, it would place increased financial responsibility on the government through diverted federal research grant funds or additional monies to underwrite the important value added by publishing. > In the coming years, this cost shift would place billions of dollars of new and additional burden on taxpayers. In the process, such a policy would undermine American jobs, exports, innovation, and intellectual property. It could also result in some scientific societies being forced to close their doors or to no longer be able to support the publication of U.S.-sponsored science that is key to ensuring that the U.S. remains the world leader in science and technology. > In addition to financing and managing a world-leading peer review process, publishers make extensive investments in education, research, and innovative digital platforms that advance American competitiveness and help ensure the quality and integrity of American science. Undermining the marketplace is unnecessary, counterproductive, and would significantly harm the system of peer-reviewed scholarly communication that fuels America’s leadership in research and innovation. > We urge you to oppose this proposed policy, and we look forward to working with the Administration on this matter.
Jerry2 7y ago
Well, I guess 2019 is going to be the last year of my paid membership. I've been a member for the past 15 years. I'll send my membership dues to Sci-Hub instead.
jillesvangurp 7y ago
I peer reviewed lots of articles when I was a researcher, including for IEEE and ACM publications. Peer reviews, editorial work, authoring articles, etc. are all part of academic life, much of which is publicly funded and benefits society. I've never heard of anyone getting payed or compensated for peer reviews. This is not a thing. Journal editors probably get payed in some cases but mostly this is a thing that is part of their professional responsibilities as e.g. a university professor and also something that looks good on their CVs and gives them influence and power. Actual labor related to proof reading, typesetting, etc. is uncommon except for some high profile publications. Mostly this work is done by authors themselves. I've dealt with professional proof readers only on two occasions. Cost related to distribution of scientific work is almost exclusively related to the printing process, which for the past 25 years has technically been completely redundant. As soon as the WWW emerged in the early nineties, scientist started distributing articles in digital form. I know, because this is when I started doing research. I think that over the course of my research career, I've only visited the library twice. Once to get a copy of some journal article by a publisher that just was just super anal about online articles and once to drop off a box of thesis copies (a requirement of the university at the time). Even before Google became a thing, finding articles online was easy. Considering the ACM is an organization that claims to act in the interest of it's members (i.e. researchers), open access should be a foregone conclusion and completely and utterly uncontroversial. The fact that this is not the case, tells me it is prioritizing other interests and not acting in good faith on behalf of its own members who would be do well to make continued membership conditional on this getting resolved ASAP. Money talks and members walking away would fix this in no time. Online publication is cheap (not free obviously) and should be easily funded from membership fees.
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  > I've never heard of anyone getting payed or compensated for peer reviews. This is not a thing. You are paid for it because if you're a paid researcher then it's part of your paid day-to-day job, in your job description.
  - peterkelly 7y ago
jdkee 7y ago
“Information wants to be free.” The iconic phrase is attributed to Stewart Brand,[1] who, in the late 1960s, founded the Whole Earth Catalog and argued that technology could be liberating rather than oppressing.[2] The earliest recorded occurrence of the expression was at the first Hackers Conference in 1984. Brand told Steve Wozniak:[3] From Wikipedia.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
sgentle 7y ago
"publishers across America make significant investments, at no cost to taxpayers" is an interesting claim. As I understand it, the majority of journal subscription revenue is from libraries and universities. Are they not taxpayer-funded? I'd also be interested to know the reasoning behind "this cost shift would place billions of dollars of new and additional burden on taxpayers". Is that because universities will have to organise their own peer review instead of paying for journals to do it for them? Surely, if organising peer review is so valuable, the universities will happily pay for it, and the almighty market (hallowed be its name) will return those billions of dollars to their rightful owners. Broadly, I think this argument is worth reading with an eye to what it doesn't say, rather than what it does. It's big on lofty appeals to "government intervention in the private market", and fastidious about mentioning the "billions of dollars" that flow through journal publishers, yet mysteriously waffles on the actual value they provide in exchange.
- fruffy 7y ago
  >yet mysteriously waffles on the actual value they provide in exchange I honestly cannot really think of one. For example, conferences organized by ACM still cost an enormous amount of money to just attend and largely break even by accepting company donations. The grants there are also largely provided by companies.
xorand 7y ago
As I said many times, the organizations which support the publishers is the problem. Lots of money go to publishers pockets because academic management support them.
erpellan 7y ago
The scientific publishing industry is a racket. It’s defending a pricing model that was steep when all journals had to be typeset and printed. Now it’s inexcusable. All Open Access does is shift the cost to the authors of the paper (usually as an explicit portion of the funding grant). The publishers still get paid! They just can’t keep charging over and over for the same PDF. Of course they’re going to whine and moan.
- plmu 7y ago
  Indeed, but the ACM is not (purely) a publisher. It should represent the interests of its members instead of betraying them.
  - qpiox 7y ago
    Next time vote for persons who are not working in USA and who are not voting in EU and other wealthy countries. The rest are not so well funded, so they should know better.
oefrha 7y ago
> Peer-reviewed articles are not free to produce. Yeah, they are not free to produce, but they can cost as little as $10 per submission. See Discrete Analysis[1], for instance. Here’s Tim Gowers’ announcement from 2015 going into the economic details.[2] [1] https://discreteanalysisjournal.com/ https://discreteanalysisjournal.com/ [2] https://gowers.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/discrete-analysis-an-arxiv-overlay-journal/ https://gowers.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/discrete-analysis-an...
awalton 7y ago
Well of course they did. The business model for the established journals is gatekeeping knowledge, so why would they be for open science?
sideshowb 7y ago
Journals get away with extortionate fees because tenure committees, interview panels etc take journal quality as a proxy for research quality when evaluating a candidate. If they stopped doing that it would certainly reduce the incentive to submit research to the more expensive journals.
AmericanChopper 7y ago
Industry pushing back against Trump for doing something that is close to universally supported on HN. Can’t see this thread surviving the front page for very long.
- anfilt 7y ago
  Just because trump is doing something does not mean it's bad. Although probably give it a closer look.
- Glyptodon 7y ago
  Whether universally supported or no it seems quite relevant.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  How does this have anything to do with Trump?
  - kick 7y ago
    https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/12/19/21029902/open-access-trump https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/12/19/21029902/o... Headline: Trump might help free science that’s locked behind paywalls Summary: Reportedly, the White House may issue an executive order on federally funded research. Publishers aren’t happy.
  - AmericanChopper 7y ago
    What does a letter addressed to Trump, opposing an executive order that he is reportedly considering have to do with Trump?
    - kick 7y ago
      That's unnecessary. The article linked doesn't mention his name once, and it's easy to be unaware of the minutiae of U.S. politics on any given day.
      - 7y ago
kick 7y ago
The ACM is a parasite of an organization. If you want to be in one of the clubs that badly, support the IEEE instead. Friendlier, cheaper, and not controlled by lawyers. The ACM has a lot of cool people, and a few nice resources, but it's not worth supporting the profiteering it does.
- acd 7y ago
  I totally disagree if you get a membership which is affordable at $99 per year you get access to lots of good learning material. That includes computer books from O'reilly and courses from Skillsoft. Portal https://learning.acm.org/ https://learning.acm.org/
  - kick 7y ago
    That doesn't give you access to the Digital Library, which is the part of this that's relevant to the article, and it doesn't change the other arguments given.
    - shinryuu 7y ago
      Still, if you compare getting O'Reilly membership by itself it would be cheaper to get the ACM membership
      - pfranz 7y ago
        My public library offers O'Reilly digital access. Unfortunately, it was some limited subset of what O'Reilly's own subscription service offers. How does ACM compare?
    - HillRat 7y ago
      Even as an ACM member with multiple subgroup memberships and subscriptions I can’t figure out what I have access to and what I don’t. Far too complex an access model for what they are.
    - metaphor 7y ago
hyperion2010 7y ago
Personally I cannot wait for the dissolution of the modern publishing industry. HN might find it of interest that many large academic publishers are trying to pivot to providing a variety of data management services to universities. The academics thus far have not been fooled, but we will see how the politics plays out.
gwicks56 7y ago
My wife is a scientist who has peer reviewed hundreds of articles. She has never been paid a dime. Worse, she is forced to pirate articles published in the same journals she is publishing in and reviews articles for, because she can't afford them and her University does not pay for them. So when they say: ```Peer-reviewed articles are not free to produce``` they are not lying, they are just forgetting to mention who covers most of that cost, for FREE!
- hos234 7y ago
  Amazon pulls in thousands of unpaid reviews for any product. Now what do you do? Give all of them the product free? Lets say 3 in 100 reviews are good. And you want those 3 to come back and review the next product. You are even willing to pay them something. Is there a guarantee that they have interest and will show up, and if they do, is there a guarantee that they produce a useful review of the same standard the second time around? Thats just one simplified reason about the dynamics of this process, that is going to block everyone from getting things for free. Its easy to react, to push to dismantle it and you just end up with YouTube style mega mass of comments under every vid where the best comments are guaranteed to get buried unless they pander to the will of the herd.
  - kmill 7y ago
    This isn't the best comparison, since journals publish the reviewed articles, not the reviews themselves. It's more like whether Amazon should pay the people who decide what should be in the Amazon Basics line, which I suspect they do.
    - hos234 7y ago
      Whether they publish the review or not misses the point completely of how they attract qualified reviewers. If you are capable of consistently attracting qualified reviewers and filtering out the masses and doing it for free by all means do it. But anyone who has tried knows its very hard to do for free. Just ask the mods of HN whether they want to work for free and the costs to them to maintain a standard.
suyash 7y ago
Long live arXiv.org, paid publications should be totally disrupted in 2020.
- mpiedrav 7y ago
  arXiv is a formidable resource. Yet, many scholars don't trust it as a source and won't publish there :( The argument from authority (e.g., publishing mafias) fallacy is ripe in academia. Same situation with textbooks. Besides profit and trying to become famous, there's no reason why a professor should publish through a traditional imprint or publisher (Pearson, Cengage, McGraw Hill, Wiley, Taylor and Francis, Elsevier, etc.). LaTeX, a Creative Commons license, and a homepage at the university department (and perhaps a GitHub/GitLab repo) is all a professor needs to make textbooks available worldwide. Writing and editing a textbook is indeed a hard task. Yet, having the end result behind paywalls and arbitrary pricing isn't worth it.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
    >> The argument from authority (e.g., publishing mafias) fallacy is ripe in academia. I believe the reason Arxiv is not trusted in some fields is that it's seen as a loophole that allows bad articles to avoid the filter of peer review and see the light of day. It would not be a problem if Arxiv was full of such articles, that would never cut it in an actual publication, but such articles are mixed with many that are eventually published and that just adds an amount of noise to the process that makes it hard to be sure what you're reading, especially if it doesn't exactly match your expertise. In other fields, e.g. in machine learning, putting your paper on Arxiv is de rigeur although of course that means anonymous reviewing goes out the window, so there's legitimiate concerns there also.
    - anjc 7y ago
      > It would not be a problem if Arxiv was full of such articles, that would never cut it in an actual publication, but such articles are mixed with many that are eventually published and that just adds an amount of noise to the process that makes it hard to be sure what you're reading I don't see this is a problem as, if you want to cite an arXiv paper, the responsibility on you increase, to ensure that the methodology etc is sound. This would be a better state of affairs than the "you must cite this highly cited paper just because it's a highly cited paper" situation we're in now.
hugofirth 7y ago
I've said this before on other threads but frankly, scientific publishers represent institutionalised theft of tax payer money: - Academics (most often publicly funded via grants and university salaries) do the work for free. - They are expected to learn to use LaTeX and to typeset their work for free. - They are expected to copy-edit the papers for free, or else pay a copy editor themselves with, you guessed it, public funds. - Volunteer Academics (on university time and therefore, again, public money) are expected to review the work for technical accuracy and novelty. If done well this is extremely time consuming. - Finally, the Journals have the temerity to charge the same universities who produce their product millions of pounds a year in journal subscriptions and Open Access fees. - Finally finally, none of the Authors are ever paid for their work. Not that it matters, because again: public funding should mean public access. The most frustrating part is that Academics themselves are locked into this system by the career prospects conferred by prestigious journals/conferences. I like to hope the ACM and other signatories will face a backlash for this. But they most likely wont
- anjc 7y ago
  If your issue is that tax payer money is being stolen then presumably open access should only be granted to citizens of a country, for research arising from academic institutions in that country? Otherwise countries will similarly be stealing tax payer money from one another. Actually, do public libraries get access to Elsevier etc?
  - y4mi 7y ago
    i'm not sure i follow... the GP is basically saying: "its paid for by public money, it shouldn't be restricted" how do you get from that to "i cant let anyone but people from my country look at this"? there no logic in that whatsoever
    - anjc 7y ago
      The argument seems to be that access to research should be unrestricted because "scientific publishers represent institutionalised theft of tax payer money", i.e. that theft of tax payer money is bad. In that case, why should people who live in tax havens, low-tax countries, or countries that don't adequately fund academia, have their access to research subsidised by people who live in high tax countries and who fund the research via tax? This seems like the same issue except at a higher level, i.e. sovereign theft instead of institutional? I have no problem with open access by the way, I'm not advocating for restrictive publishing practices here.
linuxhansl 7y ago
Of course... Money over free flow of scientific information. How is this possible? Much of this research is - at least partially - tax funded. And then publishing corporations skim money from the distribution of the information providing little or no value. In my book that perfectly meets the definition of a parasite. Perhaps I am missing something.
YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
>> This mandate already amounts to a significant government intervention in the private market. This caught my eye. I find it curious that "government intervention in the private market" seems to be treated as de facto harmful. The "mandate" refers to "a legacy regulation that is still in force today" under which "proprietary journal articles that report on federally funded research must be made available for free within 12 months of publication".
- a3n 7y ago
  > This caught my eye. I find it curious that "government intervention in the private market" seems to be treated as de facto harmful. The current administration and Senate is the target of that sentence.
choeger 7y ago
> Going below the current 12 month ‘embargo’ would make it very difficult for most American publishers to invest in publishing these articles. Then just stop doing it. If science needs publishers, scientists will soon notice. If not, well, good riddance! Frankly, ACM just kills it's own value proposition. You publish with ACM, or IEEE et. al., because they propose greater reach. If scientists realize that noone pays the ridiculous amounts of money and usually go to archive.org instead, they will soon realize that they don't need ACM for publishing. Soon after, free, or very cheap, open access journals and collections will be the go-to default. If the traditional publishers have any more value to add than a searchable catalog and a barely functioning citation index, they will compete. But I doubt it.
- qpiox 7y ago
  You are forgetting that as a researcher you are evaluated by your own university based on where you publish. And no university will suddenly start to recognize some obscure publication venues, in fact what they will do is issue a policy that such papers will not be taken into account during evalution period. Otherwise, I would claim that my personal web-site or my colleagues personal web-site is a scientific publisher and would publish my papers only there. There is a very strong infinite feedback mechanism between respected publishers and respected universities forcing us to flock to such publishers no matter the costs which are exorbitantly high for most of us. But we simply do not have a choice.
  - GhettoMaestro 7y ago
    > There is a very strong infinite feedback mechanism between respected publishers and respected universities forcing us to flock to such publishers no matter the costs which are exorbitantly high for most of us. But we simply do not have a choice. In that case it is the role of the United States Government to step in and break this monopolistic-feedback loop. A simple way would be to deny any federal-backed student loans to schools who do not openly publish and continue to incestuously be involved with ACM. Withholding money is one of the most powerful ways to change behaviors.
    - 7y ago
qpiox 7y ago
I am an ACM member and I am not American, and I was not asked if I agree with this. I feel this is an abuse of power by the ACM leadership and will speak against this internally. But, as I mentioned in another post, ACM allows it's members to use their Authorizer service to allow access to their own papers for free via their institutional or personal web-sites. This means that papers will be in-a-way openly accessible, but not via the ACM Digital Library - as a visitor you should try to go to the authors website and see if there is a free link to download the paper.
a_bonobo 7y ago
These are the dying throes of a industry that knows its days are numbered. In biology, we now have biorxiv - arxiv but for biology papers - and the growth of papers there has been exponential (source: https://twitter.com/cshperspectives/status/1192208484013674496/photo/1 https://twitter.com/cshperspectives/status/11922084840136744... ) Biorxiv is free, not peer reviewed, and accepts any format the paper is in (except reviews and rebuttals IIRC). IMHO: Papers posted to biorxiv are, currently, of higher quality than what you get as a peer reviewer from journals, because authors rely a little bit on the peer review process to clear up any remaining problems. Sometimes this actually happens. Once people are getting used to biorxiv, we'll see more low quality stuff getting submitted there, but still - biorxiv has shown us that in the Internet age, biology doesn't really need journals. HOWEVER funding bodies, universities, people who have to judge your scientific work still rely on the stamp of journals 100%. My current employer wants us to submit at least 5 papers per year in the top 10% impact factor (IF) journals of our field. If we get into a really large IF journal (Nature, Science), we get a small financial bonus. Universities are, in turn, judged based on in how many high-IF journals they publish (think uni rankings). The higher the ranking, the easier it is to advertise to students, the more money you get in fees. As long as these people can't find a different measurement for quality of scientific work we're stuck with journals - but once we have a different measurement, we can toss journals out the window immediately.
dredmorbius 7y ago
Is there any comparable list of organisations which have supported this measure? Though the list of signatories to this particular letter is extraordinarily disheartening. I'd written a brief bit a few years ago, "What the academic publishing industry calls "theft" the world calls 'research': Why Sci-Hub is so popular" https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4p2rwk/what_the_academic_publishing_industry_calls_theft/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4p2rwk/what_th... Among other points, it includes cites from notable academics (NYU's Graduate Center president Chase Robinson, and Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz) making the case for information as a public good.
buboard 7y ago
trying hard to sympathize with this letter So , a bunch of societies publish journals which rely on closed access and library subscription fees to survive. They are afraid to start charging for the open access fees, because they know that authors will prefer to publishing in other, better known open access journals instead. So they attempt to lobby Trump using the sleaziest of pretenses, appealing to his "america first" sensitivities. They also misrepresent themselves as they don't operate in an open private marketplace, since library subscriptions are practically mandatory and paid by the state in most of europe and much of US. They don't produce the intellectual property they describe either - the original authors do and also hold copyrights to it. Plus they publish a ton of submissions from foreign countries so, what are they talking about? So ... these guys should look up "streisand effect" It is inevitable that mandatory open access will lead to consolidation to a few open access libraries. That's both good and bad , but significantly more good
mpiedrav 7y ago
For any department/institution that wants to run its own journal, there's the Open Journal System [1]. They also develop the Open Conference System [2]. I used to be a sysadmin for a research institute using them. Both OJS and OCS performed reasonably well back then. Technical options to systematically counteract predatory publishing like ACM and Elsevier [3] do exist. However, it requires plenty of institutional commitment and overcoming political opposition, as it boils down to enhancing researcher reputation in an effective way. Building reputation almost from scratch vs. depending on established, well recognized publishers is kind of the perpetual FOSS vs. proprietary software conflict. [1] https://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs/ https://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs/ [2] https://pkp.sfu.ca/ocs/ https://pkp.sfu.ca/ocs/ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cost_of_Knowledge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cost_of_Knowledge
smkellat 7y ago
What a farrago of lies and deceit this is! Calling Open Access a “legacy regulation” is a rather excessive bit of lying. These journals depend very much on tax dollars which is why every library that drops them destroys their bottom line and the base of individual subscribers (teaching faculty) generally don’t pay for their subscriptions themselves. Frankly in reading this I was just shocked to see the Trump administration accused of possibly taking steps forward that the Obama administration did not/would not. We should only be paying for research once. Paying publishers repeatedly for access to somebody else’s work isn’t right in this age of competing budget priorities.
- klyrs 7y ago
  If I wanted to kill open access in today's political environment, I'd frame it as communism/socialism vs. big business/tax dollars and lobby Trump on that basis, and goad him with some anti-Obama trash talk. At first blush it sounds difficult to get Trump to care about this apparent ivory-tower issue, but in that framing, he might just care enough to act. It's a sorry state of affairs that the president is so predictably shallow.
jl2718 7y ago
Their arguments would be convincing if their peer review processes actually worked to guarantee the integrity of their published results.
vzaliva 7y ago
I am an ACM member and I see many other members like me disappointed by the stance ACM took. What is the best way to get our grievances known? Thousands comments across various forums are lost in information noise. If there is a petition or an open letter we can sign?
- kps 7y ago
  https://www.acm.org/elections/acm-council/2020-slate https://www.acm.org/elections/acm-council/2020-slate
jwally 7y ago
Honest question: what is the benefit of publishing in a peer reviewed journal vs something like Wikipedia?
- cardiffspaceman 7y ago
  Wikipedia will reject "original research". That phrase would completely apply, without scare quotes, to articles that need peer review. You could always use a blogging platform?
rasz 7y ago
Reminds me of CTIA (Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association), organizers of the biggest trade show for manufacturers of Cellphone service equipment, coming out against right to repair in 2017 during Nebraska state hearing.
fulldecent2 7y ago
As soon as I saw American Heart Association on the list I knew it was going to be a scam idea. This "non-profit" pays their CEO $1.5M, just fired all their product distributors to bring profit home, and just squeezed all their independent training centers by tripling the price of supplies to them. Lastly, they plant "volunteers" into its customers. For example, the purchasing manager for Veterans Affairs in charge of buying all CPR training for the world's largest health system is also in a leadership position with AHA. Guess who has the exclusive, non-competitive contract? When anti net neutrality was up for debate, same thing. I just needed to tell grandmom: it's a political thing Comcast is fighting for. Grandmom replies "if Comcast wants it it must be bad". Bam! Done explaining.

265 points by beefhash 7y ago

It looks like the ACM General Elections are coming up, with several officers and various other positions being available: https://www.acm.org/elections/acm-council/2020-slate https://www.acm.org/elections/acm-council/2020-slate It's likely worth someone contacting each of the nominees to publish info on where they stand on the Open Access issue. With that, the general ACM members who vote should have a decent ability to affect the ACM's future directions on this issue. :) That is assuming not 100% of all nominated people are against Open Access. Could be a bad assumption though. :(

qpiox 7y ago
Due to ACM protecting American business interests in cases such as this, as a member I give priority to people not from USA and if there is a choice, people not from EU. Most researchers from USA and EU do not understand that $15 per paper for reader access is way too much, that $99 for professional access is way too much, that SIG groups should not organize events in USA only, and when they organize event they should choose places that well connected to most of the world, and that do not have too strict visa requirements for researchers visits to scientific events.
- kick 7y ago
  To be fair to the ACM, they do have cheaper rates in developing countries: $99 won't apply to you if you're outside of North America or Europe. Still a profiteering organization, but they've thought this out a little.

denzil_correa 7y ago

I have been a reviewer for (Computer Science) journals of publications like - Springer, Elsevier, IEEE, AAAI and ACM. The reviewer doesn't receive any money for reviews. The editing is entirely taken care by the authors of the paper.

tasogare 7y ago

Yesterday I had to deal with copyright to have a conference paper published by ACM. Open Access was charged 700/900$ based on my membership. The two others options was transferring all the management rights (keep dreaming), or giving them a license that basically allow them to do whatever they want anyway. I took the last option but I was angry: this is basically blackmailing me against my carrer path to get my work for free and make money on it. And I had to do all the bullshit job of dealing with templating, which should be done by the publisher. Hopefully my personal page is well indexed in Google Scholar when searching for my name, so anyone can get my articles for free.

a3_nm 7y ago
The license option is worse than you say: it's an exclusive license, meaning that not only can they do whatever they want, but you can't even do whatever you want anymore (distributing the article, etc.).
- tasogare 7y ago
  Oh ok. I was sure there was shenanigans like that but my speciality is not law. It’s lion’s share clauses all way down.
qpiox 7y ago
@tasogare If you are an ACM member, you can use the Authorizer service to enable free access to your papers. The service creates a special link that you can use on two web-sites - for example your institutional web-site and your personal web-site, so that visitors to your web-site, will be redirected to PDF download of your papers. This effectively allows open-access to your papers, as long as you have a web-site.
- tasogare 7y ago
  I’m not. And after that I don’t plan to be one. From what I understand they "grant" me the rights to publish my preprint paper on my website. Which I planned to do anyway. As a UE citizen living in Asia I would have done so anyway, good luck for them suing me over my own work in a foreign jurisdiction.

boulos 7y ago

The letter isn't that long, and I find the press release less useful than the full text. It's also signed by many more publishers than just the ACM. > Dear President Trump: > The undersigned organizations represent the leading publishers and non-profit scientific societies in the United States. We write to you with deep concern regarding a proposed policy that has come to our attention that would jeopardize the intellectual property of American organizations engaged in the creation of high-quality peer-reviewed journals and research articles and would potentially delay the publication of new research results. The role of the publisher is to advance scholarship and innovation, fostering the American leadership in science that drives our economy and global competitiveness. As copyrighted works, peer-reviewed journal articles are licensed to users in hundreds of foreign countries, supporting billions of dollars in U.S. exports and an extensive network of American businesses and jobs. In producing and disseminating these articles, we make ongoing competitive investments to support the scientific and technical communities that we serve. > As noted above, we have learned that the Administration may be preparing to step into the private marketplace and force the immediate free distribution of journal articles financed and published by organizations in the private sector, including many non-profits. This would effectively nationalize the valuable American intellectual property that we produce and force us to give it away to the rest of the world for free. This risks reducing exports and negating many of the intellectual property protections the Administration has negotiated with our trading partners. > We write to express our strong opposition to this proposal, but in doing so we want to underscore that publishers make no claims to research data resulting from federal funding. > To be clear, publishers both support and enable “open access” business models and “open data” as important options within a larger framework that assumes critical publisher investments remain viable. Under a legacy regulation that is still in force today, proprietary journal articles that report on federally funded research must be made available for free within 12 months of publication. This mandate already amounts to a significant government intervention in the private market. Going below the current 12 month “embargo” would make it very difficult for most American publishers to invest in publishing these articles. As a consequence, it would place increased financial responsibility on the government through diverted federal research grant funds or additional monies to underwrite the important value added by publishing. > In the coming years, this cost shift would place billions of dollars of new and additional burden on taxpayers. In the process, such a policy would undermine American jobs, exports, innovation, and intellectual property. It could also result in some scientific societies being forced to close their doors or to no longer be able to support the publication of U.S.-sponsored science that is key to ensuring that the U.S. remains the world leader in science and technology. > In addition to financing and managing a world-leading peer review process, publishers make extensive investments in education, research, and innovative digital platforms that advance American competitiveness and help ensure the quality and integrity of American science. Undermining the marketplace is unnecessary, counterproductive, and would significantly harm the system of peer-reviewed scholarly communication that fuels America’s leadership in research and innovation. > We urge you to oppose this proposed policy, and we look forward to working with the Administration on this matter.

Jerry2 7y ago

Well, I guess 2019 is going to be the last year of my paid membership. I've been a member for the past 15 years. I'll send my membership dues to Sci-Hub instead.

jillesvangurp 7y ago

I peer reviewed lots of articles when I was a researcher, including for IEEE and ACM publications. Peer reviews, editorial work, authoring articles, etc. are all part of academic life, much of which is publicly funded and benefits society. I've never heard of anyone getting payed or compensated for peer reviews. This is not a thing. Journal editors probably get payed in some cases but mostly this is a thing that is part of their professional responsibilities as e.g. a university professor and also something that looks good on their CVs and gives them influence and power. Actual labor related to proof reading, typesetting, etc. is uncommon except for some high profile publications. Mostly this work is done by authors themselves. I've dealt with professional proof readers only on two occasions. Cost related to distribution of scientific work is almost exclusively related to the printing process, which for the past 25 years has technically been completely redundant. As soon as the WWW emerged in the early nineties, scientist started distributing articles in digital form. I know, because this is when I started doing research. I think that over the course of my research career, I've only visited the library twice. Once to get a copy of some journal article by a publisher that just was just super anal about online articles and once to drop off a box of thesis copies (a requirement of the university at the time). Even before Google became a thing, finding articles online was easy. Considering the ACM is an organization that claims to act in the interest of it's members (i.e. researchers), open access should be a foregone conclusion and completely and utterly uncontroversial. The fact that this is not the case, tells me it is prioritizing other interests and not acting in good faith on behalf of its own members who would be do well to make continued membership conditional on this getting resolved ASAP. Money talks and members walking away would fix this in no time. Online publication is cheap (not free obviously) and should be easily funded from membership fees.

chrisseaton 7y ago
> I've never heard of anyone getting payed or compensated for peer reviews. This is not a thing. You are paid for it because if you're a paid researcher then it's part of your paid day-to-day job, in your job description.
- peterkelly 7y ago

jdkee 7y ago

“Information wants to be free.” The iconic phrase is attributed to Stewart Brand,[1] who, in the late 1960s, founded the Whole Earth Catalog and argued that technology could be liberating rather than oppressing.[2] The earliest recorded occurrence of the expression was at the first Hackers Conference in 1984. Brand told Steve Wozniak:[3] From Wikipedia.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

sgentle 7y ago

"publishers across America make significant investments, at no cost to taxpayers" is an interesting claim. As I understand it, the majority of journal subscription revenue is from libraries and universities. Are they not taxpayer-funded? I'd also be interested to know the reasoning behind "this cost shift would place billions of dollars of new and additional burden on taxpayers". Is that because universities will have to organise their own peer review instead of paying for journals to do it for them? Surely, if organising peer review is so valuable, the universities will happily pay for it, and the almighty market (hallowed be its name) will return those billions of dollars to their rightful owners. Broadly, I think this argument is worth reading with an eye to what it doesn't say, rather than what it does. It's big on lofty appeals to "government intervention in the private market", and fastidious about mentioning the "billions of dollars" that flow through journal publishers, yet mysteriously waffles on the actual value they provide in exchange.

fruffy 7y ago
>yet mysteriously waffles on the actual value they provide in exchange I honestly cannot really think of one. For example, conferences organized by ACM still cost an enormous amount of money to just attend and largely break even by accepting company donations. The grants there are also largely provided by companies.

xorand 7y ago

As I said many times, the organizations which support the publishers is the problem. Lots of money go to publishers pockets because academic management support them.

erpellan 7y ago

The scientific publishing industry is a racket. It’s defending a pricing model that was steep when all journals had to be typeset and printed. Now it’s inexcusable. All Open Access does is shift the cost to the authors of the paper (usually as an explicit portion of the funding grant). The publishers still get paid! They just can’t keep charging over and over for the same PDF. Of course they’re going to whine and moan.

plmu 7y ago
Indeed, but the ACM is not (purely) a publisher. It should represent the interests of its members instead of betraying them.
- qpiox 7y ago
  Next time vote for persons who are not working in USA and who are not voting in EU and other wealthy countries. The rest are not so well funded, so they should know better.

oefrha 7y ago

> Peer-reviewed articles are not free to produce. Yeah, they are not free to produce, but they can cost as little as $10 per submission. See Discrete Analysis[1], for instance. Here’s Tim Gowers’ announcement from 2015 going into the economic details.[2] [1] https://discreteanalysisjournal.com/ https://discreteanalysisjournal.com/ [2] https://gowers.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/discrete-analysis-an-arxiv-overlay-journal/ https://gowers.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/discrete-analysis-an...

awalton 7y ago

Well of course they did. The business model for the established journals is gatekeeping knowledge, so why would they be for open science?

sideshowb 7y ago

Journals get away with extortionate fees because tenure committees, interview panels etc take journal quality as a proxy for research quality when evaluating a candidate. If they stopped doing that it would certainly reduce the incentive to submit research to the more expensive journals.

AmericanChopper 7y ago

Industry pushing back against Trump for doing something that is close to universally supported on HN. Can’t see this thread surviving the front page for very long.

anfilt 7y ago
Just because trump is doing something does not mean it's bad. Although probably give it a closer look.
Glyptodon 7y ago
Whether universally supported or no it seems quite relevant.
saagarjha 7y ago
How does this have anything to do with Trump?
- kick 7y ago
  https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/12/19/21029902/open-access-trump https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/12/19/21029902/o... Headline: Trump might help free science that’s locked behind paywalls Summary: Reportedly, the White House may issue an executive order on federally funded research. Publishers aren’t happy.
- AmericanChopper 7y ago
  What does a letter addressed to Trump, opposing an executive order that he is reportedly considering have to do with Trump?
  - kick 7y ago
    That's unnecessary. The article linked doesn't mention his name once, and it's easy to be unaware of the minutiae of U.S. politics on any given day.
    - 7y ago

kick 7y ago

The ACM is a parasite of an organization. If you want to be in one of the clubs that badly, support the IEEE instead. Friendlier, cheaper, and not controlled by lawyers. The ACM has a lot of cool people, and a few nice resources, but it's not worth supporting the profiteering it does.

acd 7y ago
I totally disagree if you get a membership which is affordable at $99 per year you get access to lots of good learning material. That includes computer books from O'reilly and courses from Skillsoft. Portal https://learning.acm.org/ https://learning.acm.org/
- kick 7y ago
  That doesn't give you access to the Digital Library, which is the part of this that's relevant to the article, and it doesn't change the other arguments given.
  - shinryuu 7y ago
    Still, if you compare getting O'Reilly membership by itself it would be cheaper to get the ACM membership
    - pfranz 7y ago
      My public library offers O'Reilly digital access. Unfortunately, it was some limited subset of what O'Reilly's own subscription service offers. How does ACM compare?
  - HillRat 7y ago
    Even as an ACM member with multiple subgroup memberships and subscriptions I can’t figure out what I have access to and what I don’t. Far too complex an access model for what they are.
  - metaphor 7y ago

hyperion2010 7y ago

Personally I cannot wait for the dissolution of the modern publishing industry. HN might find it of interest that many large academic publishers are trying to pivot to providing a variety of data management services to universities. The academics thus far have not been fooled, but we will see how the politics plays out.

gwicks56 7y ago

My wife is a scientist who has peer reviewed hundreds of articles. She has never been paid a dime. Worse, she is forced to pirate articles published in the same journals she is publishing in and reviews articles for, because she can't afford them and her University does not pay for them. So when they say: ```Peer-reviewed articles are not free to produce``` they are not lying, they are just forgetting to mention who covers most of that cost, for FREE!

hos234 7y ago
Amazon pulls in thousands of unpaid reviews for any product. Now what do you do? Give all of them the product free? Lets say 3 in 100 reviews are good. And you want those 3 to come back and review the next product. You are even willing to pay them something. Is there a guarantee that they have interest and will show up, and if they do, is there a guarantee that they produce a useful review of the same standard the second time around? Thats just one simplified reason about the dynamics of this process, that is going to block everyone from getting things for free. Its easy to react, to push to dismantle it and you just end up with YouTube style mega mass of comments under every vid where the best comments are guaranteed to get buried unless they pander to the will of the herd.
- kmill 7y ago
  This isn't the best comparison, since journals publish the reviewed articles, not the reviews themselves. It's more like whether Amazon should pay the people who decide what should be in the Amazon Basics line, which I suspect they do.
  - hos234 7y ago
    Whether they publish the review or not misses the point completely of how they attract qualified reviewers. If you are capable of consistently attracting qualified reviewers and filtering out the masses and doing it for free by all means do it. But anyone who has tried knows its very hard to do for free. Just ask the mods of HN whether they want to work for free and the costs to them to maintain a standard.

suyash 7y ago

Long live arXiv.org, paid publications should be totally disrupted in 2020.

mpiedrav 7y ago
arXiv is a formidable resource. Yet, many scholars don't trust it as a source and won't publish there :( The argument from authority (e.g., publishing mafias) fallacy is ripe in academia. Same situation with textbooks. Besides profit and trying to become famous, there's no reason why a professor should publish through a traditional imprint or publisher (Pearson, Cengage, McGraw Hill, Wiley, Taylor and Francis, Elsevier, etc.). LaTeX, a Creative Commons license, and a homepage at the university department (and perhaps a GitHub/GitLab repo) is all a professor needs to make textbooks available worldwide. Writing and editing a textbook is indeed a hard task. Yet, having the end result behind paywalls and arbitrary pricing isn't worth it.
- YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
  >> The argument from authority (e.g., publishing mafias) fallacy is ripe in academia. I believe the reason Arxiv is not trusted in some fields is that it's seen as a loophole that allows bad articles to avoid the filter of peer review and see the light of day. It would not be a problem if Arxiv was full of such articles, that would never cut it in an actual publication, but such articles are mixed with many that are eventually published and that just adds an amount of noise to the process that makes it hard to be sure what you're reading, especially if it doesn't exactly match your expertise. In other fields, e.g. in machine learning, putting your paper on Arxiv is de rigeur although of course that means anonymous reviewing goes out the window, so there's legitimiate concerns there also.
  - anjc 7y ago
    > It would not be a problem if Arxiv was full of such articles, that would never cut it in an actual publication, but such articles are mixed with many that are eventually published and that just adds an amount of noise to the process that makes it hard to be sure what you're reading I don't see this is a problem as, if you want to cite an arXiv paper, the responsibility on you increase, to ensure that the methodology etc is sound. This would be a better state of affairs than the "you must cite this highly cited paper just because it's a highly cited paper" situation we're in now.

hugofirth 7y ago

I've said this before on other threads but frankly, scientific publishers represent institutionalised theft of tax payer money: - Academics (most often publicly funded via grants and university salaries) do the work for free. - They are expected to learn to use LaTeX and to typeset their work for free. - They are expected to copy-edit the papers for free, or else pay a copy editor themselves with, you guessed it, public funds. - Volunteer Academics (on university time and therefore, again, public money) are expected to review the work for technical accuracy and novelty. If done well this is extremely time consuming. - Finally, the Journals have the temerity to charge the same universities who produce their product millions of pounds a year in journal subscriptions and Open Access fees. - Finally finally, none of the Authors are ever paid for their work. Not that it matters, because again: public funding should mean public access. The most frustrating part is that Academics themselves are locked into this system by the career prospects conferred by prestigious journals/conferences. I like to hope the ACM and other signatories will face a backlash for this. But they most likely wont

anjc 7y ago
If your issue is that tax payer money is being stolen then presumably open access should only be granted to citizens of a country, for research arising from academic institutions in that country? Otherwise countries will similarly be stealing tax payer money from one another. Actually, do public libraries get access to Elsevier etc?
- y4mi 7y ago
  i'm not sure i follow... the GP is basically saying: "its paid for by public money, it shouldn't be restricted" how do you get from that to "i cant let anyone but people from my country look at this"? there no logic in that whatsoever
  - anjc 7y ago
    The argument seems to be that access to research should be unrestricted because "scientific publishers represent institutionalised theft of tax payer money", i.e. that theft of tax payer money is bad. In that case, why should people who live in tax havens, low-tax countries, or countries that don't adequately fund academia, have their access to research subsidised by people who live in high tax countries and who fund the research via tax? This seems like the same issue except at a higher level, i.e. sovereign theft instead of institutional? I have no problem with open access by the way, I'm not advocating for restrictive publishing practices here.

linuxhansl 7y ago

Of course... Money over free flow of scientific information. How is this possible? Much of this research is - at least partially - tax funded. And then publishing corporations skim money from the distribution of the information providing little or no value. In my book that perfectly meets the definition of a parasite. Perhaps I am missing something.

YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago

>> This mandate already amounts to a significant government intervention in the private market. This caught my eye. I find it curious that "government intervention in the private market" seems to be treated as de facto harmful. The "mandate" refers to "a legacy regulation that is still in force today" under which "proprietary journal articles that report on federally funded research must be made available for free within 12 months of publication".

a3n 7y ago
> This caught my eye. I find it curious that "government intervention in the private market" seems to be treated as de facto harmful. The current administration and Senate is the target of that sentence.

choeger 7y ago

> Going below the current 12 month ‘embargo’ would make it very difficult for most American publishers to invest in publishing these articles. Then just stop doing it. If science needs publishers, scientists will soon notice. If not, well, good riddance! Frankly, ACM just kills it's own value proposition. You publish with ACM, or IEEE et. al., because they propose greater reach. If scientists realize that noone pays the ridiculous amounts of money and usually go to archive.org instead, they will soon realize that they don't need ACM for publishing. Soon after, free, or very cheap, open access journals and collections will be the go-to default. If the traditional publishers have any more value to add than a searchable catalog and a barely functioning citation index, they will compete. But I doubt it.

qpiox 7y ago
You are forgetting that as a researcher you are evaluated by your own university based on where you publish. And no university will suddenly start to recognize some obscure publication venues, in fact what they will do is issue a policy that such papers will not be taken into account during evalution period. Otherwise, I would claim that my personal web-site or my colleagues personal web-site is a scientific publisher and would publish my papers only there. There is a very strong infinite feedback mechanism between respected publishers and respected universities forcing us to flock to such publishers no matter the costs which are exorbitantly high for most of us. But we simply do not have a choice.
- GhettoMaestro 7y ago
  > There is a very strong infinite feedback mechanism between respected publishers and respected universities forcing us to flock to such publishers no matter the costs which are exorbitantly high for most of us. But we simply do not have a choice. In that case it is the role of the United States Government to step in and break this monopolistic-feedback loop. A simple way would be to deny any federal-backed student loans to schools who do not openly publish and continue to incestuously be involved with ACM. Withholding money is one of the most powerful ways to change behaviors.
  - 7y ago

qpiox 7y ago

I am an ACM member and I am not American, and I was not asked if I agree with this. I feel this is an abuse of power by the ACM leadership and will speak against this internally. But, as I mentioned in another post, ACM allows it's members to use their Authorizer service to allow access to their own papers for free via their institutional or personal web-sites. This means that papers will be in-a-way openly accessible, but not via the ACM Digital Library - as a visitor you should try to go to the authors website and see if there is a free link to download the paper.

a_bonobo 7y ago

These are the dying throes of a industry that knows its days are numbered. In biology, we now have biorxiv - arxiv but for biology papers - and the growth of papers there has been exponential (source: https://twitter.com/cshperspectives/status/1192208484013674496/photo/1 https://twitter.com/cshperspectives/status/11922084840136744... ) Biorxiv is free, not peer reviewed, and accepts any format the paper is in (except reviews and rebuttals IIRC). IMHO: Papers posted to biorxiv are, currently, of higher quality than what you get as a peer reviewer from journals, because authors rely a little bit on the peer review process to clear up any remaining problems. Sometimes this actually happens. Once people are getting used to biorxiv, we'll see more low quality stuff getting submitted there, but still - biorxiv has shown us that in the Internet age, biology doesn't really need journals. HOWEVER funding bodies, universities, people who have to judge your scientific work still rely on the stamp of journals 100%. My current employer wants us to submit at least 5 papers per year in the top 10% impact factor (IF) journals of our field. If we get into a really large IF journal (Nature, Science), we get a small financial bonus. Universities are, in turn, judged based on in how many high-IF journals they publish (think uni rankings). The higher the ranking, the easier it is to advertise to students, the more money you get in fees. As long as these people can't find a different measurement for quality of scientific work we're stuck with journals - but once we have a different measurement, we can toss journals out the window immediately.

dredmorbius 7y ago

Is there any comparable list of organisations which have supported this measure? Though the list of signatories to this particular letter is extraordinarily disheartening. I'd written a brief bit a few years ago, "What the academic publishing industry calls "theft" the world calls 'research': Why Sci-Hub is so popular" https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4p2rwk/what_the_academic_publishing_industry_calls_theft/ https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4p2rwk/what_th... Among other points, it includes cites from notable academics (NYU's Graduate Center president Chase Robinson, and Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz) making the case for information as a public good.

buboard 7y ago

trying hard to sympathize with this letter So , a bunch of societies publish journals which rely on closed access and library subscription fees to survive. They are afraid to start charging for the open access fees, because they know that authors will prefer to publishing in other, better known open access journals instead. So they attempt to lobby Trump using the sleaziest of pretenses, appealing to his "america first" sensitivities. They also misrepresent themselves as they don't operate in an open private marketplace, since library subscriptions are practically mandatory and paid by the state in most of europe and much of US. They don't produce the intellectual property they describe either - the original authors do and also hold copyrights to it. Plus they publish a ton of submissions from foreign countries so, what are they talking about? So ... these guys should look up "streisand effect" It is inevitable that mandatory open access will lead to consolidation to a few open access libraries. That's both good and bad , but significantly more good

mpiedrav 7y ago

For any department/institution that wants to run its own journal, there's the Open Journal System [1]. They also develop the Open Conference System [2]. I used to be a sysadmin for a research institute using them. Both OJS and OCS performed reasonably well back then. Technical options to systematically counteract predatory publishing like ACM and Elsevier [3] do exist. However, it requires plenty of institutional commitment and overcoming political opposition, as it boils down to enhancing researcher reputation in an effective way. Building reputation almost from scratch vs. depending on established, well recognized publishers is kind of the perpetual FOSS vs. proprietary software conflict. [1] https://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs/ https://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs/ [2] https://pkp.sfu.ca/ocs/ https://pkp.sfu.ca/ocs/ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cost_of_Knowledge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cost_of_Knowledge

smkellat 7y ago

What a farrago of lies and deceit this is! Calling Open Access a “legacy regulation” is a rather excessive bit of lying. These journals depend very much on tax dollars which is why every library that drops them destroys their bottom line and the base of individual subscribers (teaching faculty) generally don’t pay for their subscriptions themselves. Frankly in reading this I was just shocked to see the Trump administration accused of possibly taking steps forward that the Obama administration did not/would not. We should only be paying for research once. Paying publishers repeatedly for access to somebody else’s work isn’t right in this age of competing budget priorities.

klyrs 7y ago
If I wanted to kill open access in today's political environment, I'd frame it as communism/socialism vs. big business/tax dollars and lobby Trump on that basis, and goad him with some anti-Obama trash talk. At first blush it sounds difficult to get Trump to care about this apparent ivory-tower issue, but in that framing, he might just care enough to act. It's a sorry state of affairs that the president is so predictably shallow.

jl2718 7y ago

Their arguments would be convincing if their peer review processes actually worked to guarantee the integrity of their published results.

vzaliva 7y ago

I am an ACM member and I see many other members like me disappointed by the stance ACM took. What is the best way to get our grievances known? Thousands comments across various forums are lost in information noise. If there is a petition or an open letter we can sign?

kps 7y ago
https://www.acm.org/elections/acm-council/2020-slate https://www.acm.org/elections/acm-council/2020-slate

jwally 7y ago

Honest question: what is the benefit of publishing in a peer reviewed journal vs something like Wikipedia?

cardiffspaceman 7y ago
Wikipedia will reject "original research". That phrase would completely apply, without scare quotes, to articles that need peer review. You could always use a blogging platform?

rasz 7y ago

Reminds me of CTIA (Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association), organizers of the biggest trade show for manufacturers of Cellphone service equipment, coming out against right to repair in 2017 during Nebraska state hearing.

fulldecent2 7y ago

As soon as I saw American Heart Association on the list I knew it was going to be a scam idea. This "non-profit" pays their CEO $1.5M, just fired all their product distributors to bring profit home, and just squeezed all their independent training centers by tripling the price of supplies to them. Lastly, they plant "volunteers" into its customers. For example, the purchasing manager for Veterans Affairs in charge of buying all CPR training for the world's largest health system is also in a leadership position with AHA. Guess who has the exclusive, non-competitive contract? When anti net neutrality was up for debate, same thing. I just needed to tell grandmom: it's a political thing Comcast is fighting for. Grandmom replies "if Comcast wants it it must be bad". Bam! Done explaining.