24 ms·

Matt Blaze: How ACM and IEEE Shake Down Science

240 points by alterego 16y ago

drallison 16y ago
Matt Blaze is right on point, as usual; in fact, he probably does not go far enough in his critique of scientific publishing. Commercial publishers from Nature to those on the long tail are as bad or worse. The "in your face" commercial paywall in front of most technical journals is a frequent user experience here on Hacker News. And counterproductive to doing good science and engineering. If the free exchange of information promotes the growth of human knowledge, then free it ought to be. The ACM an IEEE digital libraries have improved and simplified research in many ways. The fact that they are behind a paywall and available only to members (and some institutions) is a negative. Many alternative venues for publication are appearing, for example, Arxiv, http://arxiv.org/ http://arxiv.org/. Google's Knol service is also a reasonable place for articles about new work. But they do not have the cachet of a peer-reviewed archival journal. ACM and IEEE are membership organizations. Perhaps we need a grass roots effort to change the copyright policy to, say, one of the creative commons licenses and open the digital libraries and electronic journals to all comers. On the other hand, a well run, professionally edited journal costs money to produce. In a world where content is free, how should we monetize publications so that the staff gets paid?
- oiuyhtgyhuj 16y ago
  No problem with Nature's paywall they are a business. I do have a problem with no longer owning the copyright to a paper I wrote and gave to them for free - or even paid page charges to some journals So I put a sample of code in a paper to explain an algorithm and I can no longer use that code, or include it in a GPLed work? In fact between my university's policy that it owns anything I do that can be commercially exploited, the journal claiming it owns everything and I can't post it online and the various different international laws on software patents and publishing code that has anything to do with crypto/security - in theory I would spend a year talking to lawyers before publishing each paper.
  - drallison 16y ago
    Just because the journal Nature is run as a business does not mean that charging for access to published material promotes scientific progress. If the growth of scientific knowledge is of primary importance and depends upon the wide dissemination of knowledge, charging for access is socially irresponsible. It could be that the conflict here is with our rather strange notion of intellectual property and a free market economy. Robert Laughlin's The Crime of Reason: And the Closing of the Scientific Mind makes the case that the two are antithetical. A free market requires that something be secret and not generally available to create an artificial shortage and pump the price. Perhaps we need to rethink what constitutes intellectual property. What sort of an intellectual property policy would you propose to your university? Who should own ideas? Or should they be held in common? Will Mickey Mouse ever slip into the public domain?
    - oiuyhtgyhuj 16y ago
      I don't think Nature charging holds back progress - so long as I am also free(speech) to make the work available for free(beer). Nature is paid to do two jobs. 1, Provide a copy of the paper on paper to sit in a library for 100s of years. 2, Certify that a paper has at least been written by somebody vaguely reputable and has been peer reviewed Originally the first job was the main role, now with the internet the second is far more important. I am happy for my institution to pay for a paper copy of Nature in order that there is a universally recognised 'I am not a crank' stamp to put on my work. Think of it as an SSL-cert for my pages. Yes I would like there to be a free open online web-of-trust for peer reviewed papers - but for now I have no objection to Nature doing that. And I would much rather have a commercial publisher do it than have it mixed in with a professional body like IEEE/ACM/IOP who have a whole other set of agendas.
    - eegilbert 16y ago
      Nature, however, provides a very unique academic service: they can give you a "no" within two weeks. This is light-speed in academic publishing. Most ACM conferences take 4 months to return an answer. Journals in other fields can take years.
  - 16y ago
- jdp23 16y ago
  > ACM and IEEE are membership organizations. Perhaps we need a grass roots effort to change the copyright policy to, say, one of the creative commons licenses and open the digital libraries and electronic journals to all comers. Sounds like a great idea, especially in conjunction with the boycott/strike Matt's proposing.
- Anechoic 16y ago
  On the other hand, a well run, professionally edited journal costs money to produce But how much? I'm not familiar with ACM/IEEE but looking at the journals and standards bodies that I do contribute to, I know that they don't pay authors for contributions (in some cases the authors have to pay the journals) and they don't pay editors or reviewers. As far as I can tell, they only thing they pay for is administrators and the materials to publish hard copies. If it were a case where the content producers were getting paid for their labor, I'd have a much easier time justifying the cost for papers and standards, but paying $50-$200 per PDF is a bit ridiculous.
  - oiuyhtgyhuj 16y ago
    The reason is that live on institution subscriptions. If they switched to an iTunes $5/paper download then there would be less pressure on university libraries to pay $1000s/year for a subscription (the library pays a lot more than members for a journal) It's like the cable companies, they want your $100/month irrespective of whats showing - they don't want you to pay $1/show for what you actually want to watch.
    - te_chris 16y ago
      You should be upvoted more. These organisations exist to extract millions of dollars of subscription fees out of University Libraries each year.
    - drallison 16y ago
      Even a $5/paper fee is too costly. On an average day I probably read 5 papers and browse another 5 papers. That means my research habit would cost $17,250. And that is too expensive for just casual reading.
    - chalst 16y ago
      I wouldn't trust Apple to maintain an archive of peer-reviewed science for the next 100 years, which is what librarians aim to do. Institutional subscriptions are part of this picture: libraries receive all the publications of the journals they subscribe to and archive them.
- MichaelSalib 16y ago
  On the other hand, a well run, professionally edited journal costs money to produce. Does it cost more money to produce than Wikipedia? As I understand it, editors generally work for free. Reviewers generally work for free. Authors either work for free or pay for the privilege of publishing. Heck, authors generally supply their work already typeset. So what exactly is the cost here? I mean, I'm sure that IEEE/ACM have a staff that is used to getting paid, but what value are they adding if all the skilled labor is done for free by the community and all the technical wrangling is done by authors themselves?
  - neutronicus 16y ago
    Authors either work for free or pay for the privilege of publishing. I don't know where you get this. IEEE/ACM may not be paying them, but they are sure as hell getting paid to write the papers that go in those journals. Does it cost more money to produce than Wikipedia? The difference being that there are only 4 or 5 people in the world capable of producing or verifying the articles that appear in scientific journal.
    - MichaelSalib 16y ago
      I don't know where you get this. From publishing an article in an IEEE journal? I mean, I did DARPA funded work in grad school and got it published in a journal. I understand very well that authors are generally paid. My point remains: they are not paid BY THE JOURNAL. From the journal's perspective, authors do not cost them anything. The difference being that there are only 4 or 5 people in the world capable of producing or verifying the articles that appear in scientific journal. And academic journals generally don't pay them a damn thing.
      - streptomycin 16y ago
        It's expensive to run a journal. PLoS isn't evil, but they still spend millions of dollars every year http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v441/n7096/full/441914a.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v441/n7096/full/441914a...
- michael_dorfman 16y ago
  Commercial publishers from Nature to those on the long tail are as bad or worse. I think this point needs repeating. Let's remember that Knuth took the Journal of Algorithms from Elsevier to the ACM (where it was reborn as TALG) for this very reason. (Cf http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/joalet.pdf http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/joalet.pdf) The ACM, to its credit, has avoided the extortionate fees charged by many of the commercial scientific journals.
- modeless 16y ago
  Physical Review Letters recently adopted a system where authors can pay a fee to have their submissions published under a Creative Commons license. The fee replaces journal subscription/paywall revenue. http://prl.aps.org/edannounce/CC-launch-press-release http://prl.aps.org/edannounce/CC-launch-press-release
  - bbb 16y ago
    Oh, sure, Springer will also let you publish "open access" articles. However, the publishing fee goes up from a few hundred dollars to a couple of thousand. Now find me a prof that will actually sacrifice his precious grant dollars for that.
- mechanical_fish 16y ago
  how should we monetize publications so that the staff gets paid? That's a toughie in general, but for scientific publications the model is obvious: They get paid with government money, the same money that pays for most of them now (and that also pays for most of the scientists and the studies). But, of course, right now there are lots of middlemen: The government gives grants to researchers, who pass on a substantial fraction of said grants to their institutions, who fund institutional libraries, who buy subscriptions from the journal publishers, who pay the editors. We could cut out some or all of those intermediaries, but the for-profit journal publishers -- as the first on the list to be disintermediated -- are not going quietly.
voracioush 16y ago
Don't these commercial publishers hire editors who actively contribute/edit to papers which they choose to publish? Also, don't many of these publishers pay authors for work? Decrying that they are "socially irresponsible" and that everything should be available for free seems to be looking at this in a very simplistic way.
- logjam 16y ago
  I've had several peer-reviewed papers published. The reviewers (who are unpaid) often have excellent suggestions and often do the work of an editor. However, I have NEVER had an editor or other paid staff of a journal offer ANY assistance on the manuscript whatsoever, to include stuff I'd ordinarily think an editor would do as part of the job: edit. In talking with my colleagues, their experience is the same. I'm not personally aware of ANY scientific journals where authors or reviewers are paid by journals. I'm not interested in getting paid for publishing. However, like most other scientists, I'm tired of having to jump through hoops to get access to research data and findings that we citizens collectively paid to produce. This is all anecdotal of course. I'm not aware of any broader literature or even editorials describing what value, if any, is added by the current system.
  - metageek 16y ago
    >I'm not aware of any broader literature or even editorials describing what value, if any, is added by the current system. I can just imagine the challenge of getting such studies published.
    - chalst 16y ago
      There are many conferences that deal with open access in the context of scholalrly publication. E.g., http://www.lub.lu.se/ncsc/program.html Peter Suber keeps a list: http://www.lub.lu.se/ncsc/program.html Many library science journals are open access, e.g., Ariadne. Example article: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue57/waaijers-et-al/
  - patio11 16y ago
ajb 16y ago
I wonder if it would be considered bad to block ieee/acm using the google chrome blocker plugin (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2218382 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2218382). I geniunely don't want to see them in my results, but they're not quite a content farm.
smutticus 16y ago
What's even worse is that the IEEE charges to read their standards. The ITU charges as well but the IETF thankfully does not. All 3 organizations are effectively doing the same thing. Granted their standards focus on different areas. But why can the IETF manage this completely without charging while the others have to charge extortionate fees?
- csperkins 16y ago
  The IETF charges attendees $650 in meeting registration, and receives close to $1M/year in sponsorship from the Internet Society and industry (budgets on http://iaoc.ietf.org/ http://iaoc.ietf.org/). Free access to IETF standards is subsidised out of other fees...
krschultz 16y ago
Most white papers are written by professors and students who are supported by grants. These grants generally come from DARPA, the NSF, or other federal programs. All that money comes from the taxpayers. Yet as a taxpayer, I still have to buy the papers from a journal. A journal that hasn't funded the research, but profits from it. A) What a cushy gig, I wish I had invented a professional society B) This is an issue worth far more of the easily drummed up internet outrage than most of the silly things we all get worked up about, yet it seems to fly under the radar most of the time
- Lewisham 16y ago
  This is the most aggravating part of it for me (I'm a PhD student who has stuff in the ACM library); I'm paid for by the NSF, but my understanding is that the NSF does not require the papers to be freely available. I think there may be some countries/grants that do force open the publications they funded. The problem is systemic, and will only be changed by direct, large-scale intervention. Fortunately, the US government is really well positioned to do that. If all the NSF funded papers went away tomorrow, you can bet IEEE and ACM would change. The question is whether the government will do this, but they haven't show all that much interest so far.
  - larsberg 16y ago
    As another PhD student, I don't really get all of the rage. In practice, everything post-1997 is easily accessible, and if you're searching through CiteseerX you probably won't even notice the difference. I won't claim it's a great system, but there is observational equivalence with "free and unencumbered publication" modulo a 3" x 4" blurb of text on the lower-left of the first page of the document. Except for a select few Springer-Verlag publications (mainly the more book-chapter-like ones).
    - patrickyeon 16y ago
      When you are no longer a student, it will not be so easy. IEEE and ACM (at least) will charge you for articles, and without an IP address registered to your university, all you'll see is abstracts.
neilc 16y ago
I thought this was obvious to everyone? ACM, IEEE, and the rest of the scientific publishing establishment are antiquated dinosaurs. They will eventually adapt to the existence of the Internet. Thankfully, in CS, they are mostly just a nuisance -- access to the scientific literature in other fields is significantly less open. To be fair to IEEE, the ACM's official policy is at least as bad. Actually, the ACM are a little bit more reasonable: authors typically have to sign over copyright, but they retain the right to post "author-prepared" versions of papers on their personal web sites, albeit with an ACM copyright blurb attached (most people ignore that requirement, though).
- gcb 16y ago
  The tricky is to remember that an exact copy of the article can be called pre-published version by the author and nobody can say it isn't. and if you are very afraid, you can just remove or add one meaningless coma. that should get you covered. disclaimer: i'm not an IP lawyer. Also I do not subscribe to ancient extortion business models like ACM
  - rick_2047 16y ago
    I would certainly like a confirmation of this. If I remove a whole paragraph (like of acknowledgements or related research (which is already covered in the reference section)) does that mean that the paper is not owned by the journal? What if I make my own formatting and change the conclusion paragraph?
    - neilc 16y ago
      Per http://www.acm.org/publications/policies/copyright_policy#Definitive http://www.acm.org/publications/policies/copyright_policy#De...: "As part of their retained rights, authors may revise their ACM-copyrighted work. If the new work is substantially developed, it is considered a new derivative work. The author owns the copyright in the new work and may do as she wishes with it. The author must incorporate a citation to the previous work with a notice ... If the work is a minor revision, copyright remains with ACM."
hfinney 16y ago
Part of the problem is that the journals are part of a complicated infrastructure for judging academic quality. The best authors compete to get published in the best journals. The best journals are based on years or decades of reputation and history. You can't create de novo a system to replace this instantly. There is a chicken and egg problem to be solved before we have free publishing venues with a widely accepted reputation for only publishing the best papers.
praptak 16y ago
Hint: I never had any problems obtaining a scientific paper by directly contacting its author. Many of the papers are directly downloadable from author's pages.
- davidwparker 16y ago
  Matt mentions that in his write-up, but then mentions that the IEEE is changing its status of allowing uploads on author's pages: Some time in January, the IEEE apparently quietly revised its copyright policy to explicitly forbid us authors from sharing the "final" versions of our papers on the web
anonymous246 16y ago
I suggest he run for office on a platform of changing the policy. I'm sure he'll win.
- anonymous246 16y ago
  Dear downvoter, in case it wasn't clear, the IEEE and ACM both have elected officials. I was suggesting he run for office within the IEEE or ACM, not for public office. Thanks.
iqster 16y ago
As someone who has published papers in ACM and IEEE conferences, I have had similar feelings to that in the article. The thing is ... conferences (the unpaid Program Committees) are required for curation. There are too many papers published ... by attending and reading papers from top conferences, I can keep things sane. ACM and IEEE support the conferences by underwriting them. Consider a conference like SOSP ... last time I was there, I think there were 500+ academics in attendance. Despite corporate sponsors, there just isn't enough upfront cash (participant registration fees come in AFTER the venue is booked, for example) I can't see a way for academics to self-organize at this scale.
- quag 16y ago
  And yet, linux.conf.au managed to self-organize at this scale with a completely different set of organizers each year.
  - gritzko 16y ago
    FOSDEM is also a good example of how things could be organized.
bedris 16y ago
The National Institutes of Health (NIH), which funds approximately one third of all biomedical research in the USA [1], requires that all peer-reviewed manuscripts that arise from NIH funds be submitted within 12 months of acceptance to a journal to a digital archive, PubMed Central, where the articles can be freely and publicly accessed [2]. [1] http://www.medpagetoday.com/PublicHealthPolicy/HealthPolicy/1767 http://www.medpagetoday.com/PublicHealthPolicy/HealthPolicy/... [2] http://publicaccess.nih.gov/ http://publicaccess.nih.gov/
- blahblahblah 16y ago
  What NIH did for biomedical research is the solution that needs to implemented elsewhere. The funding agencies have all the power that is needed to change the behavior of the journals and professional societies. Virtually everyone involved in academic research relies upon grants to fund their projects and the federal government is, by far, the largest supplier of grant money for research. If open access publishing is required for grant recipients then the journals will be forced to adapt or die.
edcrfv 16y ago
One major problem with ACM and IEEE is that they charge per paper. I do believe there's a plan in IEEEthat lets you download 25 papers per month for a fee. I'm not sure abotu ACM. I wish there were a subscription plan where you could pay some fixed amount and read unlimited number of papers, but I presume they'd be wary of people (especially students) sharing access to such accounts.

240 points by alterego 16y ago

Matt Blaze is right on point, as usual; in fact, he probably does not go far enough in his critique of scientific publishing. Commercial publishers from Nature to those on the long tail are as bad or worse. The "in your face" commercial paywall in front of most technical journals is a frequent user experience here on Hacker News. And counterproductive to doing good science and engineering. If the free exchange of information promotes the growth of human knowledge, then free it ought to be. The ACM an IEEE digital libraries have improved and simplified research in many ways. The fact that they are behind a paywall and available only to members (and some institutions) is a negative. Many alternative venues for publication are appearing, for example, Arxiv, http://arxiv.org/ http://arxiv.org/. Google's Knol service is also a reasonable place for articles about new work. But they do not have the cachet of a peer-reviewed archival journal. ACM and IEEE are membership organizations. Perhaps we need a grass roots effort to change the copyright policy to, say, one of the creative commons licenses and open the digital libraries and electronic journals to all comers. On the other hand, a well run, professionally edited journal costs money to produce. In a world where content is free, how should we monetize publications so that the staff gets paid?

oiuyhtgyhuj 16y ago
No problem with Nature's paywall they are a business. I do have a problem with no longer owning the copyright to a paper I wrote and gave to them for free - or even paid page charges to some journals So I put a sample of code in a paper to explain an algorithm and I can no longer use that code, or include it in a GPLed work? In fact between my university's policy that it owns anything I do that can be commercially exploited, the journal claiming it owns everything and I can't post it online and the various different international laws on software patents and publishing code that has anything to do with crypto/security - in theory I would spend a year talking to lawyers before publishing each paper.
- drallison 16y ago
  Just because the journal Nature is run as a business does not mean that charging for access to published material promotes scientific progress. If the growth of scientific knowledge is of primary importance and depends upon the wide dissemination of knowledge, charging for access is socially irresponsible. It could be that the conflict here is with our rather strange notion of intellectual property and a free market economy. Robert Laughlin's The Crime of Reason: And the Closing of the Scientific Mind makes the case that the two are antithetical. A free market requires that something be secret and not generally available to create an artificial shortage and pump the price. Perhaps we need to rethink what constitutes intellectual property. What sort of an intellectual property policy would you propose to your university? Who should own ideas? Or should they be held in common? Will Mickey Mouse ever slip into the public domain?
  - oiuyhtgyhuj 16y ago
    I don't think Nature charging holds back progress - so long as I am also free(speech) to make the work available for free(beer). Nature is paid to do two jobs. 1, Provide a copy of the paper on paper to sit in a library for 100s of years. 2, Certify that a paper has at least been written by somebody vaguely reputable and has been peer reviewed Originally the first job was the main role, now with the internet the second is far more important. I am happy for my institution to pay for a paper copy of Nature in order that there is a universally recognised 'I am not a crank' stamp to put on my work. Think of it as an SSL-cert for my pages. Yes I would like there to be a free open online web-of-trust for peer reviewed papers - but for now I have no objection to Nature doing that. And I would much rather have a commercial publisher do it than have it mixed in with a professional body like IEEE/ACM/IOP who have a whole other set of agendas.
  - eegilbert 16y ago
    Nature, however, provides a very unique academic service: they can give you a "no" within two weeks. This is light-speed in academic publishing. Most ACM conferences take 4 months to return an answer. Journals in other fields can take years.
- 16y ago
jdp23 16y ago
> ACM and IEEE are membership organizations. Perhaps we need a grass roots effort to change the copyright policy to, say, one of the creative commons licenses and open the digital libraries and electronic journals to all comers. Sounds like a great idea, especially in conjunction with the boycott/strike Matt's proposing.
Anechoic 16y ago
On the other hand, a well run, professionally edited journal costs money to produce But how much? I'm not familiar with ACM/IEEE but looking at the journals and standards bodies that I do contribute to, I know that they don't pay authors for contributions (in some cases the authors have to pay the journals) and they don't pay editors or reviewers. As far as I can tell, they only thing they pay for is administrators and the materials to publish hard copies. If it were a case where the content producers were getting paid for their labor, I'd have a much easier time justifying the cost for papers and standards, but paying $50-$200 per PDF is a bit ridiculous.
- oiuyhtgyhuj 16y ago
  The reason is that live on institution subscriptions. If they switched to an iTunes $5/paper download then there would be less pressure on university libraries to pay $1000s/year for a subscription (the library pays a lot more than members for a journal) It's like the cable companies, they want your $100/month irrespective of whats showing - they don't want you to pay $1/show for what you actually want to watch.
  - te_chris 16y ago
    You should be upvoted more. These organisations exist to extract millions of dollars of subscription fees out of University Libraries each year.
  - drallison 16y ago
    Even a $5/paper fee is too costly. On an average day I probably read 5 papers and browse another 5 papers. That means my research habit would cost $17,250. And that is too expensive for just casual reading.
  - chalst 16y ago
    I wouldn't trust Apple to maintain an archive of peer-reviewed science for the next 100 years, which is what librarians aim to do. Institutional subscriptions are part of this picture: libraries receive all the publications of the journals they subscribe to and archive them.
MichaelSalib 16y ago
On the other hand, a well run, professionally edited journal costs money to produce. Does it cost more money to produce than Wikipedia? As I understand it, editors generally work for free. Reviewers generally work for free. Authors either work for free or pay for the privilege of publishing. Heck, authors generally supply their work already typeset. So what exactly is the cost here? I mean, I'm sure that IEEE/ACM have a staff that is used to getting paid, but what value are they adding if all the skilled labor is done for free by the community and all the technical wrangling is done by authors themselves?
- neutronicus 16y ago
  Authors either work for free or pay for the privilege of publishing. I don't know where you get this. IEEE/ACM may not be paying them, but they are sure as hell getting paid to write the papers that go in those journals. Does it cost more money to produce than Wikipedia? The difference being that there are only 4 or 5 people in the world capable of producing or verifying the articles that appear in scientific journal.
  - MichaelSalib 16y ago
    I don't know where you get this. From publishing an article in an IEEE journal? I mean, I did DARPA funded work in grad school and got it published in a journal. I understand very well that authors are generally paid. My point remains: they are not paid BY THE JOURNAL. From the journal's perspective, authors do not cost them anything. The difference being that there are only 4 or 5 people in the world capable of producing or verifying the articles that appear in scientific journal. And academic journals generally don't pay them a damn thing.
    - streptomycin 16y ago
      It's expensive to run a journal. PLoS isn't evil, but they still spend millions of dollars every year http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v441/n7096/full/441914a.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v441/n7096/full/441914a...
michael_dorfman 16y ago
Commercial publishers from Nature to those on the long tail are as bad or worse. I think this point needs repeating. Let's remember that Knuth took the Journal of Algorithms from Elsevier to the ACM (where it was reborn as TALG) for this very reason. (Cf http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/joalet.pdf http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/joalet.pdf) The ACM, to its credit, has avoided the extortionate fees charged by many of the commercial scientific journals.
modeless 16y ago
Physical Review Letters recently adopted a system where authors can pay a fee to have their submissions published under a Creative Commons license. The fee replaces journal subscription/paywall revenue. http://prl.aps.org/edannounce/CC-launch-press-release http://prl.aps.org/edannounce/CC-launch-press-release
- bbb 16y ago
  Oh, sure, Springer will also let you publish "open access" articles. However, the publishing fee goes up from a few hundred dollars to a couple of thousand. Now find me a prof that will actually sacrifice his precious grant dollars for that.
mechanical_fish 16y ago
how should we monetize publications so that the staff gets paid? That's a toughie in general, but for scientific publications the model is obvious: They get paid with government money, the same money that pays for most of them now (and that also pays for most of the scientists and the studies). But, of course, right now there are lots of middlemen: The government gives grants to researchers, who pass on a substantial fraction of said grants to their institutions, who fund institutional libraries, who buy subscriptions from the journal publishers, who pay the editors. We could cut out some or all of those intermediaries, but the for-profit journal publishers -- as the first on the list to be disintermediated -- are not going quietly.

voracioush 16y ago

Don't these commercial publishers hire editors who actively contribute/edit to papers which they choose to publish? Also, don't many of these publishers pay authors for work? Decrying that they are "socially irresponsible" and that everything should be available for free seems to be looking at this in a very simplistic way.

logjam 16y ago
I've had several peer-reviewed papers published. The reviewers (who are unpaid) often have excellent suggestions and often do the work of an editor. However, I have NEVER had an editor or other paid staff of a journal offer ANY assistance on the manuscript whatsoever, to include stuff I'd ordinarily think an editor would do as part of the job: edit. In talking with my colleagues, their experience is the same. I'm not personally aware of ANY scientific journals where authors or reviewers are paid by journals. I'm not interested in getting paid for publishing. However, like most other scientists, I'm tired of having to jump through hoops to get access to research data and findings that we citizens collectively paid to produce. This is all anecdotal of course. I'm not aware of any broader literature or even editorials describing what value, if any, is added by the current system.
- metageek 16y ago
  >I'm not aware of any broader literature or even editorials describing what value, if any, is added by the current system. I can just imagine the challenge of getting such studies published.
  - chalst 16y ago
    There are many conferences that deal with open access in the context of scholalrly publication. E.g., http://www.lub.lu.se/ncsc/program.html Peter Suber keeps a list: http://www.lub.lu.se/ncsc/program.html Many library science journals are open access, e.g., Ariadne. Example article: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue57/waaijers-et-al/
- patio11 16y ago

ajb 16y ago

I wonder if it would be considered bad to block ieee/acm using the google chrome blocker plugin (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2218382 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2218382). I geniunely don't want to see them in my results, but they're not quite a content farm.

smutticus 16y ago

What's even worse is that the IEEE charges to read their standards. The ITU charges as well but the IETF thankfully does not. All 3 organizations are effectively doing the same thing. Granted their standards focus on different areas. But why can the IETF manage this completely without charging while the others have to charge extortionate fees?

csperkins 16y ago
The IETF charges attendees $650 in meeting registration, and receives close to $1M/year in sponsorship from the Internet Society and industry (budgets on http://iaoc.ietf.org/ http://iaoc.ietf.org/). Free access to IETF standards is subsidised out of other fees...

krschultz 16y ago

Most white papers are written by professors and students who are supported by grants. These grants generally come from DARPA, the NSF, or other federal programs. All that money comes from the taxpayers. Yet as a taxpayer, I still have to buy the papers from a journal. A journal that hasn't funded the research, but profits from it. A) What a cushy gig, I wish I had invented a professional society B) This is an issue worth far more of the easily drummed up internet outrage than most of the silly things we all get worked up about, yet it seems to fly under the radar most of the time

Lewisham 16y ago
This is the most aggravating part of it for me (I'm a PhD student who has stuff in the ACM library); I'm paid for by the NSF, but my understanding is that the NSF does not require the papers to be freely available. I think there may be some countries/grants that do force open the publications they funded. The problem is systemic, and will only be changed by direct, large-scale intervention. Fortunately, the US government is really well positioned to do that. If all the NSF funded papers went away tomorrow, you can bet IEEE and ACM would change. The question is whether the government will do this, but they haven't show all that much interest so far.
- larsberg 16y ago
  As another PhD student, I don't really get all of the rage. In practice, everything post-1997 is easily accessible, and if you're searching through CiteseerX you probably won't even notice the difference. I won't claim it's a great system, but there is observational equivalence with "free and unencumbered publication" modulo a 3" x 4" blurb of text on the lower-left of the first page of the document. Except for a select few Springer-Verlag publications (mainly the more book-chapter-like ones).
  - patrickyeon 16y ago
    When you are no longer a student, it will not be so easy. IEEE and ACM (at least) will charge you for articles, and without an IP address registered to your university, all you'll see is abstracts.

neilc 16y ago

I thought this was obvious to everyone? ACM, IEEE, and the rest of the scientific publishing establishment are antiquated dinosaurs. They will eventually adapt to the existence of the Internet. Thankfully, in CS, they are mostly just a nuisance -- access to the scientific literature in other fields is significantly less open. To be fair to IEEE, the ACM's official policy is at least as bad. Actually, the ACM are a little bit more reasonable: authors typically have to sign over copyright, but they retain the right to post "author-prepared" versions of papers on their personal web sites, albeit with an ACM copyright blurb attached (most people ignore that requirement, though).

gcb 16y ago
The tricky is to remember that an exact copy of the article can be called pre-published version by the author and nobody can say it isn't. and if you are very afraid, you can just remove or add one meaningless coma. that should get you covered. disclaimer: i'm not an IP lawyer. Also I do not subscribe to ancient extortion business models like ACM
- rick_2047 16y ago
  I would certainly like a confirmation of this. If I remove a whole paragraph (like of acknowledgements or related research (which is already covered in the reference section)) does that mean that the paper is not owned by the journal? What if I make my own formatting and change the conclusion paragraph?
  - neilc 16y ago
    Per http://www.acm.org/publications/policies/copyright_policy#Definitive http://www.acm.org/publications/policies/copyright_policy#De...: "As part of their retained rights, authors may revise their ACM-copyrighted work. If the new work is substantially developed, it is considered a new derivative work. The author owns the copyright in the new work and may do as she wishes with it. The author must incorporate a citation to the previous work with a notice ... If the work is a minor revision, copyright remains with ACM."

hfinney 16y ago

Part of the problem is that the journals are part of a complicated infrastructure for judging academic quality. The best authors compete to get published in the best journals. The best journals are based on years or decades of reputation and history. You can't create de novo a system to replace this instantly. There is a chicken and egg problem to be solved before we have free publishing venues with a widely accepted reputation for only publishing the best papers.

praptak 16y ago

Hint: I never had any problems obtaining a scientific paper by directly contacting its author. Many of the papers are directly downloadable from author's pages.

davidwparker 16y ago
Matt mentions that in his write-up, but then mentions that the IEEE is changing its status of allowing uploads on author's pages: Some time in January, the IEEE apparently quietly revised its copyright policy to explicitly forbid us authors from sharing the "final" versions of our papers on the web

anonymous246 16y ago

I suggest he run for office on a platform of changing the policy. I'm sure he'll win.

anonymous246 16y ago
Dear downvoter, in case it wasn't clear, the IEEE and ACM both have elected officials. I was suggesting he run for office within the IEEE or ACM, not for public office. Thanks.

iqster 16y ago

As someone who has published papers in ACM and IEEE conferences, I have had similar feelings to that in the article. The thing is ... conferences (the unpaid Program Committees) are required for curation. There are too many papers published ... by attending and reading papers from top conferences, I can keep things sane. ACM and IEEE support the conferences by underwriting them. Consider a conference like SOSP ... last time I was there, I think there were 500+ academics in attendance. Despite corporate sponsors, there just isn't enough upfront cash (participant registration fees come in AFTER the venue is booked, for example) I can't see a way for academics to self-organize at this scale.

quag 16y ago
And yet, linux.conf.au managed to self-organize at this scale with a completely different set of organizers each year.
- gritzko 16y ago
  FOSDEM is also a good example of how things could be organized.

bedris 16y ago

The National Institutes of Health (NIH), which funds approximately one third of all biomedical research in the USA [1], requires that all peer-reviewed manuscripts that arise from NIH funds be submitted within 12 months of acceptance to a journal to a digital archive, PubMed Central, where the articles can be freely and publicly accessed [2]. [1] http://www.medpagetoday.com/PublicHealthPolicy/HealthPolicy/1767 http://www.medpagetoday.com/PublicHealthPolicy/HealthPolicy/... [2] http://publicaccess.nih.gov/ http://publicaccess.nih.gov/

blahblahblah 16y ago
What NIH did for biomedical research is the solution that needs to implemented elsewhere. The funding agencies have all the power that is needed to change the behavior of the journals and professional societies. Virtually everyone involved in academic research relies upon grants to fund their projects and the federal government is, by far, the largest supplier of grant money for research. If open access publishing is required for grant recipients then the journals will be forced to adapt or die.

edcrfv 16y ago

One major problem with ACM and IEEE is that they charge per paper. I do believe there's a plan in IEEEthat lets you download 25 papers per month for a fee. I'm not sure abotu ACM. I wish there were a subscription plan where you could pay some fixed amount and read unlimited number of papers, but I presume they'd be wary of people (especially students) sharing access to such accounts.