9 ms·

IEEE: Pay $3000 and we'll remove your article's paywall.

59 points by blickly 16y ago

elouise 16y ago
they think scholars have enough money to do the research AND pay $3000 to have it openly published? it's the beginning of the end of closed academic publishing models.
- naish 16y ago
  I certainly do not. It is usually enough of a challenge to cover "overpage" charges that publishers charge when an accepted article runs over the "standard" length (usually 8 pages for a standard or regular article). Often times, the "extra" pages are introduced by additional text required to satisfy reviewers. One time I was requested to convert an 8 page article submitted as a regular paper into a short paper format (4 page limit), while adding a significant amount of new content. The result? A 7 page article that ended up costing $575 to publish. We won't even talk about charges for colour figures, which can run into the thousands. Of course the money spent on overpage charges could be better spent on graduate student stipends, equipment purchases and maintenance, software licensing, attending conferences, and other expenses incurred by an active research program. Other open journals, while still expensive, charge significantly less than what the IEEE is proposing. The challenge for academics is that, at least for now, IEEE journals are well regarded, well cited and considered to be a prestigious venue for publication.
  - MrGunn 16y ago
    The idea here is that the tend of thousands your library is paying now could be used to offset your costs to go the "Gold OA" route. With this discussion of fees, I have to point out that the majority of OA journals don't charge any fees at all, and of those that do their fees are generally comparable to the page charges you'd be paying at a non-OA journal. It's only a rare few, like these guys, Nature Publishing, and a few others that charge so much. PLoS charges about half that.
- aheilbut 16y ago
  The open access publishers like PLoS also have publication charges. The fact is that properly reviewed and edited journals do add value, producing journals costs money, and at some point, somebody has to pay.
  - krschultz 16y ago
    Somebody has to pay, but does everyone have to pay?
andrewcurioso 16y ago
This is very topical for me. I have been drafting a paper that I was hoping to submit to the IEEE. This "might" change my mind. I'm not sure yet. There are stipulations that you can publish your work on personal sites if you get permission from the organization and you include a copyright notice at the top. Incidentally, they also have an optional but suggested charge for papers containing color diagrams and over-length papers. They say that an organization should include publication costs in their budget for the research and thus the fees are reasonable. The author guidelines, are dozens of pages long and I only had a week to absorb them so correct me if I missed something.
- Lewisham 16y ago
  Incidentally, they also have an optional but suggested charge for papers containing color diagrams and over-length papers. These are wonderful holdovers from when people read papers in actual printed copies. When's the last time you read a paper from a printed copy from the publisher? That's why they're "optional" (and roundly ignored, AFAIK). It's another example of their completely outdated monetization methods.
inetsee 16y ago
I have a counter-suggestion: pay $3000 to support one of the open access journals (see The Directory of Open Access Journals "http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=home&uiLanguage=en http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=home&uiLanguage=en for suggestions) and they'll let you post as many articles as you want. (Of course, I believe most of them will let you post for free, but by contributing articles and money to open access journals, you get to stick it to IEEE twice).
- ebiester 16y ago
  So... how is the tenure committee going to do with the fact that you have nothing in peer-reviewed journals?
  - bertil 16y ago
    All the journals in the list linked are peer-reviewed. We would all appreciate if you could keep your purposely misinformed snide out of academia.
kilburn 16y ago
From the website: "Open access can coexist with traditional publishing. IEEE will continue to allow authors to post manuscripts of their articles accepted by IEEE journals on their own Web sites or those of their employers." Hence, it would be perfectly fine for me to publish on IEEE journals. Basically, if you want to read one of my articles you just have to look for it using google scholar. Is it that difficult?
- Lewisham 16y ago
  ...but remember this is only because they have no choice. IEEE/ACM would love to remove these clauses, but they've realized if they do, that's going to be the match that lights the fuse for all-out academic rebellion. It's not like that's a gift or some evidence that they are in any way reasonable. They're totally aware of the precipitous situation they're in, they just don't want to/don't have the competency to fix their monetization strategy.
  - alexqgb 16y ago
    The fact that they're "granting you permission" to post your own paper, which you wrote at your own expense (or that of supporters you secured independently from the IEEE), and in which they have no legitimate copyright claim on your own website just underscores how dangerously close to the wind these guys are really sailing. Unless they're actually bribing tenure committees to maintain their exclusive (and totally unearned) hold on people's professional futures, it seems like they're one coordinated action away from a richly-deserved implosion.
- jokrausdu 16y ago
  I use this database to check on publisher permissions. http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/search.php http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/search.php Authors of IEEE articles can archive pre-print and post-print but they cannot archive publisher's version/PDF. And there are lots of conditions.
sh1mmer 16y ago
It would have made more sense if it wasn't called a "processing fee". That implies they can justify the cost with specific work associated with making a paper available.
- Lewisham 16y ago
  I would be happier if IEEE/ACM would typeset the damn articles. The International Conference of Software Engineering this year has hired a publishing company that have been sending manuscripts back for even the slightest failure to meet (their interpretation of) the ACM style guide. I've gone through the process 4 or 5 times across multiple papers. You can't charge $3000 for the benefit of putting a PDF on a website when you do absolutely nothing for the creation of it. If they did the typesetting themselves, I might (might) accept that there are some costs per article, but at this point it's obviously complete nonsense on similar old-world scales as the NYT's $41m pay wall. Putting PDFs up is a fixed cost, which, even amortized over the development of the site, is nowhere near $3000 per article over and above the revenue they are receiving from libraries and memberships. We keep getting told that there are overheads in running a journal; that open-access can't work without significant investiture. I disagree. When all you are doing is facilitating communication (academics do essentially everything for free: write, typeset, review, accept/reject, organize conferences, and new things like storing source code and data for replicability like PROMISE or SIGMOD), you are just a middleman. All that's being provided at this point is "authority" because ACM/IEEE-stamped articles count towards tenure, and the rest don't (at least in CompSci). This sort of thing is ripe for disruption: a competently written web app could annihilate the processes that are in place. The only problem is selling the authority. A company like Google or Microsoft Research taking to the right people and bringing them on-board for a rival publication/conference would do that (MSR are actually quite well-versed in doing conferences, the Foundations of Digital Games conference started with them, and that's now ACM for authority). I think most academics are totally fed up with the status quo, so I can't imagine that's all that hard, you just need the money to have a dedicated person to do all the "selling."
guan 16y ago
$3,000 may be too much, but I basically like this idea. Isn’t the whole premise of (peer-reviewed) open access that authors would pay fees sufficient to cover the cost of publishing and peer review, so libraries aren’t ripped off by publishers? This is at least how PLoS and other leading open access journals I’ve heard of work. If $3,000 is a ripoff, authors would refuse to pay and will pressure IEEE to reduce prices or take their business elsewhere, which has happened in a number of fields where open access journals have sprung up. Having libraries pay the publisher is not as effective for cost control. Maybe peer review or even journals should die? I don’t quite agree, but if it’s true, having authors pay is probably the best way of bringing this about.
dnsworks 16y ago
It's 2011, this publishing model is not only obsolete, it's irrelevant.
grsites 16y ago
This kind of gouging soon won't be a problem anymore. I'm in the process of creating an online service (launch date sometime this summer) that will provide completely free full-text access to all academic journals in one fell swoop. Think Napster for academic research. I won't give implementation details for now, and I'm still evaluating different domain names, but it will be called Acropolis. Yes, I know it will create a legal shitstorm, but I feel it's a small price to pay for what is at stake. To hell with it. Academic research is supposed to be free.
- alecco 16y ago
  Well, there are private torrent sites with most journals already. Or so I've heard ;)
  - grsites 16y ago
    I haven't found any, but I guess that's the problem: they're private.
- mariuskempe 16y ago
  I look forward. Is there a twitterfeed / alert mailing list?
  - grsites 16y ago
    No yet, but once it launches, you'll know. :-)
- Lewisham 16y ago
  How are you doing this? Citeseer caches the free versions people upload to their personal sites, so they're already making a clearing house for papers that skirts the legality. I am guessing you're crawling from behind some library account, but I'm not entirely sure how you'd be avoiding detection from the local library (assuming, perhaps wrongly, reasonable comp sec competency).
  - 16y ago
Mythrl 16y ago
I don't understand the criticism leveled at organizations like IEEE although maybe I'm missing something. These are professional organizations and consequently non-profits. So even though they charge a lot to access the articles, it implies that nobody is actually getting rich off this. Edit: I know that there are some for profit publishing houses, but there are also many journals published by non-profits (IEEE being one of them).
- aristus 16y ago
  nonprofit doesn't guarantee reasonable prices. The Computer Society arm of IEEE boasts 80K members, and over $200 million dollars cash reserves: http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/abs/html/mags/co/2007/09/r9077.htm http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/abs/html/mags/co/200...
- bertil 16y ago
  Many people are wondering the same thing: because most of the work is done by unpaid third party, the actual cost structure doesn't seem to match their demands. From what I understand, although the publisher is an academic non-profit, they handle the conference and outsource the publishing operation to one of a handful of a for-profit operator, most of whom are Dutch, iirc (Elsevier, Reuters).
- alexqgb 16y ago
  Also, "non-profit" only refers to the tax status of the organization. The fact that the organization employs management that may be grossly overcompensated is left unmentioned. In any case, the relationship is likely to be highly - and personally - profitable for the people running it.
- Muzza 16y ago
  http://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/early-retirement/ http://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/early-retirement/ Read the section "Non-profits are NOT the Answer".
davidu 16y ago
"hybrid open access" Bullshit What you mean is "not open access." Don't lie to us.

59 points by blickly 16y ago

they think scholars have enough money to do the research AND pay $3000 to have it openly published? it's the beginning of the end of closed academic publishing models.

naish 16y ago
I certainly do not. It is usually enough of a challenge to cover "overpage" charges that publishers charge when an accepted article runs over the "standard" length (usually 8 pages for a standard or regular article). Often times, the "extra" pages are introduced by additional text required to satisfy reviewers. One time I was requested to convert an 8 page article submitted as a regular paper into a short paper format (4 page limit), while adding a significant amount of new content. The result? A 7 page article that ended up costing $575 to publish. We won't even talk about charges for colour figures, which can run into the thousands. Of course the money spent on overpage charges could be better spent on graduate student stipends, equipment purchases and maintenance, software licensing, attending conferences, and other expenses incurred by an active research program. Other open journals, while still expensive, charge significantly less than what the IEEE is proposing. The challenge for academics is that, at least for now, IEEE journals are well regarded, well cited and considered to be a prestigious venue for publication.
- MrGunn 16y ago
  The idea here is that the tend of thousands your library is paying now could be used to offset your costs to go the "Gold OA" route. With this discussion of fees, I have to point out that the majority of OA journals don't charge any fees at all, and of those that do their fees are generally comparable to the page charges you'd be paying at a non-OA journal. It's only a rare few, like these guys, Nature Publishing, and a few others that charge so much. PLoS charges about half that.
aheilbut 16y ago
The open access publishers like PLoS also have publication charges. The fact is that properly reviewed and edited journals do add value, producing journals costs money, and at some point, somebody has to pay.
- krschultz 16y ago
  Somebody has to pay, but does everyone have to pay?

andrewcurioso 16y ago

This is very topical for me. I have been drafting a paper that I was hoping to submit to the IEEE. This "might" change my mind. I'm not sure yet. There are stipulations that you can publish your work on personal sites if you get permission from the organization and you include a copyright notice at the top. Incidentally, they also have an optional but suggested charge for papers containing color diagrams and over-length papers. They say that an organization should include publication costs in their budget for the research and thus the fees are reasonable. The author guidelines, are dozens of pages long and I only had a week to absorb them so correct me if I missed something.

Lewisham 16y ago
Incidentally, they also have an optional but suggested charge for papers containing color diagrams and over-length papers. These are wonderful holdovers from when people read papers in actual printed copies. When's the last time you read a paper from a printed copy from the publisher? That's why they're "optional" (and roundly ignored, AFAIK). It's another example of their completely outdated monetization methods.

inetsee 16y ago

I have a counter-suggestion: pay $3000 to support one of the open access journals (see The Directory of Open Access Journals "http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=home&uiLanguage=en http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=home&uiLanguage=en for suggestions) and they'll let you post as many articles as you want. (Of course, I believe most of them will let you post for free, but by contributing articles and money to open access journals, you get to stick it to IEEE twice).

ebiester 16y ago
So... how is the tenure committee going to do with the fact that you have nothing in peer-reviewed journals?
- bertil 16y ago
  All the journals in the list linked are peer-reviewed. We would all appreciate if you could keep your purposely misinformed snide out of academia.

kilburn 16y ago

From the website: "Open access can coexist with traditional publishing. IEEE will continue to allow authors to post manuscripts of their articles accepted by IEEE journals on their own Web sites or those of their employers." Hence, it would be perfectly fine for me to publish on IEEE journals. Basically, if you want to read one of my articles you just have to look for it using google scholar. Is it that difficult?

Lewisham 16y ago
...but remember this is only because they have no choice. IEEE/ACM would love to remove these clauses, but they've realized if they do, that's going to be the match that lights the fuse for all-out academic rebellion. It's not like that's a gift or some evidence that they are in any way reasonable. They're totally aware of the precipitous situation they're in, they just don't want to/don't have the competency to fix their monetization strategy.
- alexqgb 16y ago
  The fact that they're "granting you permission" to post your own paper, which you wrote at your own expense (or that of supporters you secured independently from the IEEE), and in which they have no legitimate copyright claim on your own website just underscores how dangerously close to the wind these guys are really sailing. Unless they're actually bribing tenure committees to maintain their exclusive (and totally unearned) hold on people's professional futures, it seems like they're one coordinated action away from a richly-deserved implosion.
jokrausdu 16y ago
I use this database to check on publisher permissions. http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/search.php http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/search.php Authors of IEEE articles can archive pre-print and post-print but they cannot archive publisher's version/PDF. And there are lots of conditions.

sh1mmer 16y ago

It would have made more sense if it wasn't called a "processing fee". That implies they can justify the cost with specific work associated with making a paper available.

Lewisham 16y ago
I would be happier if IEEE/ACM would typeset the damn articles. The International Conference of Software Engineering this year has hired a publishing company that have been sending manuscripts back for even the slightest failure to meet (their interpretation of) the ACM style guide. I've gone through the process 4 or 5 times across multiple papers. You can't charge $3000 for the benefit of putting a PDF on a website when you do absolutely nothing for the creation of it. If they did the typesetting themselves, I might (might) accept that there are some costs per article, but at this point it's obviously complete nonsense on similar old-world scales as the NYT's $41m pay wall. Putting PDFs up is a fixed cost, which, even amortized over the development of the site, is nowhere near $3000 per article over and above the revenue they are receiving from libraries and memberships. We keep getting told that there are overheads in running a journal; that open-access can't work without significant investiture. I disagree. When all you are doing is facilitating communication (academics do essentially everything for free: write, typeset, review, accept/reject, organize conferences, and new things like storing source code and data for replicability like PROMISE or SIGMOD), you are just a middleman. All that's being provided at this point is "authority" because ACM/IEEE-stamped articles count towards tenure, and the rest don't (at least in CompSci). This sort of thing is ripe for disruption: a competently written web app could annihilate the processes that are in place. The only problem is selling the authority. A company like Google or Microsoft Research taking to the right people and bringing them on-board for a rival publication/conference would do that (MSR are actually quite well-versed in doing conferences, the Foundations of Digital Games conference started with them, and that's now ACM for authority). I think most academics are totally fed up with the status quo, so I can't imagine that's all that hard, you just need the money to have a dedicated person to do all the "selling."

guan 16y ago

$3,000 may be too much, but I basically like this idea. Isn’t the whole premise of (peer-reviewed) open access that authors would pay fees sufficient to cover the cost of publishing and peer review, so libraries aren’t ripped off by publishers? This is at least how PLoS and other leading open access journals I’ve heard of work. If $3,000 is a ripoff, authors would refuse to pay and will pressure IEEE to reduce prices or take their business elsewhere, which has happened in a number of fields where open access journals have sprung up. Having libraries pay the publisher is not as effective for cost control. Maybe peer review or even journals should die? I don’t quite agree, but if it’s true, having authors pay is probably the best way of bringing this about.

dnsworks 16y ago

It's 2011, this publishing model is not only obsolete, it's irrelevant.

grsites 16y ago

This kind of gouging soon won't be a problem anymore. I'm in the process of creating an online service (launch date sometime this summer) that will provide completely free full-text access to all academic journals in one fell swoop. Think Napster for academic research. I won't give implementation details for now, and I'm still evaluating different domain names, but it will be called Acropolis. Yes, I know it will create a legal shitstorm, but I feel it's a small price to pay for what is at stake. To hell with it. Academic research is supposed to be free.

alecco 16y ago
Well, there are private torrent sites with most journals already. Or so I've heard ;)
- grsites 16y ago
  I haven't found any, but I guess that's the problem: they're private.
mariuskempe 16y ago
I look forward. Is there a twitterfeed / alert mailing list?
- grsites 16y ago
  No yet, but once it launches, you'll know. :-)
Lewisham 16y ago
How are you doing this? Citeseer caches the free versions people upload to their personal sites, so they're already making a clearing house for papers that skirts the legality. I am guessing you're crawling from behind some library account, but I'm not entirely sure how you'd be avoiding detection from the local library (assuming, perhaps wrongly, reasonable comp sec competency).
- 16y ago

Mythrl 16y ago

I don't understand the criticism leveled at organizations like IEEE although maybe I'm missing something. These are professional organizations and consequently non-profits. So even though they charge a lot to access the articles, it implies that nobody is actually getting rich off this. Edit: I know that there are some for profit publishing houses, but there are also many journals published by non-profits (IEEE being one of them).

aristus 16y ago
nonprofit doesn't guarantee reasonable prices. The Computer Society arm of IEEE boasts 80K members, and over $200 million dollars cash reserves: http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/abs/html/mags/co/2007/09/r9077.htm http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/abs/html/mags/co/200...
bertil 16y ago
Many people are wondering the same thing: because most of the work is done by unpaid third party, the actual cost structure doesn't seem to match their demands. From what I understand, although the publisher is an academic non-profit, they handle the conference and outsource the publishing operation to one of a handful of a for-profit operator, most of whom are Dutch, iirc (Elsevier, Reuters).
alexqgb 16y ago
Also, "non-profit" only refers to the tax status of the organization. The fact that the organization employs management that may be grossly overcompensated is left unmentioned. In any case, the relationship is likely to be highly - and personally - profitable for the people running it.
Muzza 16y ago
http://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/early-retirement/ http://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/early-retirement/ Read the section "Non-profits are NOT the Answer".

davidu 16y ago

"hybrid open access" Bullshit What you mean is "not open access." Don't lie to us.