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Don't Publish with IEEE (2005)
- mro_name 2y agoin german law it's even impossible to transfer copyright (Urheberrecht). There is but one way: inheriting. What can be transferred though is usage right - licensing.
- Gracana 2y agoI just found this explanation on the linked site: Many Germans incorrectly believe that copyrights cannot be abandoned. The actual situation in German law is as follows: "Nutzungsrechte" (literally "usage rights") include the rights of copying, modification, distribution, etc. These rights can be waived, as in other countries. "Urheberrechte" (literally "originator rights") include reputation rights and generally cannot be waived. This protection against fraud, libel, etc. has nothing to do with whether something is in the public domain. https://cr.yp.to/publicdomain.html https://cr.yp.to/publicdomain.html
- PreInternet01 2y agoMeta: the linked post is undated, but available on the Wayback Machine as early as November 2005, so a (2005) in the title is warranted and, in any case, this isn't new advice...
- trurl42 2y agoLast-Modified: Mon, 21 Nov 2005 04:40:39 GMT
- account42 2y agoIf only browsers cared about making useful infomation available.
- curiousfab 2y agoCtrl+i (Firefox) Not generally useful to show this by default, because nowadays most pages are dynamically generated and although it's technically easy to implement, the last modified header is typically not set to $now.
- johannes1234321 2y agoWell, if Browsers would show it more prominently, there were more motivation to think about it for developers. But Browsers are bad HTTP clients. Think about bad user experience with file uploads (no built in progress report!?), HTTP auth (not showing status, no logout etc.)
- renonce 2y agoIn Chrome you can F12 and go to "Network" tab and then refresh the page. Choose the first file in the list (that's the HTML itself) and you will find "Response Headers" in the "Headers" panel, which includes Last-Modified. It's a bit deep, which makes sense as it's rarely useful.
- mschuster91 2y agoLast-Modified can have unwanted negative influence on caching behavior. If you want to expose metadata, there's OpenGraph et al. to do the job properly.
- marginalia_nu 2y agoTo be fair, the Last-Modified header is very sketchy. I use it as one of the heuristics for determining the age of a website in my search engine. It's not great. It's frequently found incorrect, both older and younger than the actual age of the document. It's a bit of a relic from back in ye olden days when websites were static .htm files in a folder, which is so rarely the case today. It doesn't help it's also got overloaded uses via If-Modified-Since -style conditional requests.
- account42 2y agoPlenty of websites also play with the user-visible dates on websites to game search engines - most dates shown in Google results seem to be complete garbage. I don't think Modified-Since is really worse, and it at least gives you a chance to maybe get a date for static pages. But you are right that If-Modified-Since forces it to be a date for the complete document rather than the content, which might not be as useful to normal users for dynamic pages.
- A_D_E_P_T 2y agoNot only is that link really old, the IEEE has their own preprint server now, TechRxiv: https://innovate.ieee.org/techrxiv_launch/ https://innovate.ieee.org/techrxiv_launch/ Everybody should use preprint servers, and TechRxiv deserves more love and attention than it gets.
- rolandog 2y agoI'll go try to answer these for myself, but — using the "both things can be true" argument — I have a couple if follow-up questions: 1. Do they still require transfer of copyright to IEEE? 2. Or, conversely, do they publish public domain articles?
- A_D_E_P_T 2y ago1. No. "TechRxiv offers several Creative Commons licenses, all of which permit you to retain copyright of your work. You do not need to transfer your copyright to TechRxiv." 2. Preprint servers aren't really for the publication of articles that were already published elsewhere. But you can have an article published on TechRxiv peer-reviewed and subsequently published in an IEEE journal -- or a non-IEEE journal, for that matter.
- pyrale 2y agoI don't get it. Why use a preprint server associated with publishers, when publishers have the history they have? What's the difference with putting them on e.g. arxiv?
- A_D_E_P_T 2y agoArxiv has a narrow focus (only physics) and it's rather difficult to even get permission to publish there in the first place. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory runs BioRxiv and MedRxiv for biology and medicine, respectively, but again there's the issue of focus. Those are the big three. Then IEEE started TechRxiv as a preprint server for tech/engineering, which, given the landscape at the time, was a good move.
- Semaphor 2y ago2005 Discussed in 2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3051014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3051014
- frognumber 2y ago[flagged]
- rob_c 2y agoUnfortunately this is exactly what came to mind seeing the level of non response to the level of question. Someone on the other end was ill equipped to fill their role well. Either through lack of time, skill, training or ability. I'll be optimistic and think the former but suspect one of the latter.
- zero_k 2y agoPublishing in Academia is a scam. Nowadays everyone puts their papers also on arxiv.org so at least we can read each other's papers for free. While of course still paying the fees to these publishers who are doing nothing but messing up the PDF (I have to fight them to fix the mistakes they add every time a paper is published), while claiming to do a value-add, which happens to add value to nobody but their own pockets. It's a scam through and through. Of course one has to examine why this system is still in place. And it's mostly to do with policies in universities, where certain journals/conferences are valued more, and changing that is hard, because e.g. Springer happens to own the name. So we all pay millions to Springer, for the use of this name (that we, together, made great, not Springer), and in return, they charge us the privilege of reading the papers that we reviewed, edited, and wrote. It's insane, but it can't be changed as long as universities refuse to change. So the hard truth is, it's not Springer/IEEE/Nature/etc, it's ultimately, us.
- logifail 2y ago> Publishing in Academia is a scam Relatively soon after starting work on my PhD, one of my more-experienced colleagues explained the affect of "impact factor" on academic publishing. Back then I was young and naive, and assumed that at least impact factor itself would be some kind of open system based on freely-available data. Many years later, I read up on this and discovered Web of Science/Clarivate :( How is it possible that scientists and academics are gated from the most important metrics based on their own output and by which they measure themselves and are measured by those who fund them? It's completely nuts.
- coliveira 2y agoMy reply is that people want to live in a capitalist country, but don't want to live with the consequences of that. This is one of the consequences.
- littlestymaar 2y agoPeople want to live in free and democratic countries and in that respect capitalism is the least bad of the totalitarian regimes that exists…
- einpoklum 2y agoThe situation had not improved much for the 10-15 years at least after that post was authored (which is when I was actively publishing). But - writers could, then, and can now, use the "standard trick" to get past IEEE copyright transfer requirements: https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/119002/7319 https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/119002/7319 that works for a person who actually holds copyrights and can trasfer them - so that IEEE gets its papers, and eventually the author regains the right to also publish, modify, distribute etc. their paper. For public domain it could be a bit trickier, and would require looking at the text of the current IEEE forms. I would guess that an appropriate loophole can be found to achieve a similar result.
- cernocky 2y agoWhat we need is: 1. make science self-publishing using decentralised protocols the default 2. redefine traditional journals and publishers as curators or labellers on top of the network, instead of owners
- beezlebroxxxxxx 2y agoBefore you do either of those you need to convince academia that publishing in traditional journals/"prestige" legacy journals does not matter as much to the job. The entire system has Goodhart's Law-ed themselves into a trap connecting tenure to a very specific kind of publishing. Until that changes everything else will just get ignored.
- jltsiren 2y agoThe academia is not the real problem. Once you pass the initial filters, you will be judged by other academics, who are usually pretty reasonable. (For every reviewer 2, there is also a reviewer 1 and a reviewer 3.) They may not always notice that things work in different ways in different fields, and they may not have enough time to evaluate you properly. But they will usually at least try to see behind the metrics. Governments are another matter, because they lack the expertise to judge your work. Immigration officials in particular are something academics often have to deal with. For some type-2 fun, try applying for a visa that requires something beyond a PhD from a reputable university and a job offer.
- jll29 2y agoBut publishing a public domain paper with a commercial publisher still makes little sense, unless the paper is also _open access_, for without the latter, the public domain document could still be put behind a pay wall. Just because it is owned by no-body does not create a duty for the publisher to open their paywall (unlike, for instance, the viral clauses of software licenses like FSF's GPL, which include language that actually forces sharing).
- jampekka 2y agoIt it's public domain copies can hosted by anyone.
- nature556 2y agoI don't get it at all why to use a pre-print servers?
- Y_Y 2y agoBecause you want people to read what you've written. You can publish on your personal site too, but Arxiv aggregates things nicely and is easy and free.
- JBorrow 2y agoThankfully there are a few amazing Diamond/Platinum open access journals popping up (that are often ‘arXiv overlay’, meaning they simply provide peer review services to arXiv-hosted papers). These journals are free to publish and free to read but still provide the useful categorisation/review/cataloguing services of traditional publications. Notably this includes a post-review DOI. Relevant for the HN crowd is the Journal of Open Source Software: joss.theoj.org. [I am an editor at JOSS]
- marmaduke 2y agoI tend to think of science as a distributed consensus process, and that peer review is analogous to a proof of work, and publishers are gatekeeping the distribution of proof of work. I think this is a useful analogy because one can subtract (in theory) the gatekeeping entirely: distributing proof of work is required for the distributed consensus to update. However, and, crucially, journals differ in their effect on the consensus, e.g. IEEE or PNAS have much higher impact factors, and the competition both among researchers and institutions creates a market opportunity for gatekeeping, that naturally sorts those same researchers and institutions for the next ground of grants. Again, I think it's hard to understand what a fix would look like, if we don't first recognize how distributed consensus should work for science. Algos like Paxos require a leader, and editorial boards for journals are effectively leaders.
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- compsciphd 2y agoAs someone who published multiple papers during his academic days under auspices of ACM, USENIX and IEEE, I never saw a case where they demanded that authors not host a copy of the paper for themselves for their "own" audience on their own website. Furthermore, the concept of a "public domain" paper in academia just seems weird to me. the concept of "public domain" means that the contents can be reused in whole or in part without attribution of any sorts to the original author(s). that goes against the ethos of academia (i.e. plagiarism) in regards to authoring papers, so unsure what public domain for the actual paper gives users vs. the document being what I'd refer to as "freely available" (i.e. no one else can charge for access to the document, only the 'copyright' holder can). If the author has a right to freely distribute the document (and anyone who gets the document from the author maintains the same right), I don't see what public domain "assignment" gains anyone. i.e. copyright assignment (to the publisher) with the ability to freely distribute the paper accomplishes all these goals. The only thing (I can imagine) that it doesn't accomplish is giving others the ability to collect a bunch of papers together and sell it for "profit". But that doesn't seem to be a something DJB views as needed (and in fact, rails against the publishers who are requesting the copyright assignment for that very purpose).