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The Elsevier boycott one year on
- aswanson 14y agoI would like to see a similar effort directed towards the IEEE and Acm publishing associations. They both leech off of publicly funded research and impede scientific and technological progress with their myriad paywalls.
- rokk88 14y ago>off of
- aswanson 14y agoYeah. Mayhap 'from' would be a proper fealty to the god of english language parsimony, in substitution.
- pcrh 14y ago"Off of" is one of my pet peeves as well. Unfortunately, its usage is legitimate, if sometimes unpopular. "Off of used to be standard in English; the MWDEU starts off with a Shakespearean usage [1592] and continues with Pepys [1668] and Bunyan [1678]. In the last century, they show it used by Hemingway, Faulkner, and Harry Truman, among others. So if it is making a comeback, it’s no harbinger of linguistic doom, just a return to form." http://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2012/07/31/on-off-of/ http://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2012/07/31/on-off-of/
- omaranto 14y agoWhy is it a pet peeve of yours? Do you have a reason you could explain our does it just rub you the wrong way?
- pcrh 14y agoI guess my reasons are the same as those described in the link above, i.e. it is a matter of dialect, my own dialect of English doesn't use "off of" and it sounds ridiculous to my ears; it produces a similar reaction to being confronted with mis-use of there/their/they're. However, English is a very ill-behaved language, and "off of" just happens to be one of its irritating aspects I'll have to put up with.
- sushantsharma 14y agoFWIW, ACM has something called ACM Authorizer that enables authors to post links to their papers so that others can read them without paying any charges to ACM. http://www.acm.org/publications/acm-author-izer-service http://www.acm.org/publications/acm-author-izer-service
- seanmcdirmid 14y agoYou can already post your articles yourself, the Authorizer just helps you plug into the DL bookkeeping. And what's the point? What value do we realy get from the Digital Library these days? Its a feature that requires critical mass to be useful, and the fact that it is exclusive means it will never have critical mass. Check out the latest CACM article on the open access issue: http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2013/2/160170-positioning-acm-for-an-open-access-future/fulltext http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2013/2/160170-positioning-acm-... I think the ACM is pretty much in denial at this point.
- mHORxaq 14y agoThis is why there is http://articleak.allalla.com/ http://articleak.allalla.com/
- CamperBob2 14y agoAlso /r/scholar on Reddit. Some very helpful folks there.
- scott_s 14y agoThey are professional organizations, not just publishers. As professional organizations, their primary goal is to support their members and the betterment of the field. They may not always have paywalls; unlike Elsivier, their organization exists for purposes other than getting money from publications. The co-chairs of the ACM Publishing Board recently wrote an editorial, "Positioning ACM for an Open Access Future": http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2013/2/160170-positioning-acm-for-an-open-access-future/fulltext http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2013/2/160170-positioning-acm-... It's not enough, but it's a start, and I'm hopeful. I am a member of both the ACM and IEEE, and I want both of these organizations to move to a fully open access model.
- aswanson 14y agoIf their primary goal is to support members and the betterment of their field, then why are they impeding the sharing of information amongst said members and the public at large, not only with recent research but legacy papers from the 80s? My guess is that the organizations have evolved into self-serving fat bureaucratic fiefdoms.
- czr80 14y agoElsevier and other large publishers publish many journals on behalf of societies, so the distinction between the interests of professional organisations and publishers doesn't really work.
- scott_s 14y agoI think there is a clear distinction: Elsivier cannot go to an open access model, because it would cease to exist from lack of revenue, while the ACM and IEEE can continue to exist with an open access model because of membership dues.
- seanmcdirmid 14y agoThe ACM already makes a lot more on conferences than dues, I think.
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- femto 14y agoIEEE and ACM are supposedly democratic organisations. The way to change them is from the inside: get a core group of members on-side, put candidates up for election and start building support among the membership. Reading around, there's at least some movement on the open-access front in the IEEE. IEEE allows authors to pay a hefty up-front free to make their paper "open-access" [1] and one of the candidates in the last election has the words "open-access" in his statement [2]. [1] http://theinstitute.ieee.org/briefings/business/ieee-expands-openaccess-offerings http://theinstitute.ieee.org/briefings/business/ieee-expands... [2] http://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/election/2012candidates.pdf http://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/election/2012candidates.... Edit: grammar
- rayiner 14y agoThis "free as in speech" == "free as in beer" shtick has become weird. When you're more fundamentalist than RMS it's time to step back and introspect.
- clicks 14y agoHave you read Eben Moglen's writings per chance? Your thoughts? If you haven't looked into his work, here's something (in line with topic) to get started on: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbcy_ZxXLl8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbcy_ZxXLl8 -- I'd be curious to hear your thoughts. It's 1 hour 11 minutes, but I promise every second is worth watching. Moglen is an excellent communicator. Near 8 minutes in, he says this: This is the introduction to the free software movement. This is the purpose of the free software movement. This is the aim not only of the free software movement, but of a large number of the other things we are doing that arise from the fact that the digital revolution means that knowledge no longer has a non-zero marginal cost, that when you have the first copy of any significant representation of knowledge – whatever the fixed cost of the production of that representation may have been – you have as many additional copies, everywhere, as you need, without any significant additional costs. The non-zero marginal cost quality of all the things we digitize, which – in the society we are now building – is everything we value, because we digitize everything we can value, right down to how we fit in our jeans, right? In the world where we digitize everything of value and everything of value has been digitized, a moral question of significance arises: When you can provide to everybody everything that you value, at the cost of providing it to any one body, what is the morality of excluding people who cannot afford to pay? If you could make as much bread, or have as many fishes, as you needed to feed everyone, at the cost of the first loaf and the first fish plus a button press, what would be the morality for charging more for loaves and fishes than the poorest person could afford to pay? It’s a difficult moral problem, explaining why you are excluding people from that which you yourself value highly and could provide to them for nothing. The best way of solving this moral problem is not to acknowledge its existence, which is the current theory. The current theory in force takes the view that industrial society lived in a world of non-zero marginal cost for information – information and the ability to learn had to be embedded in analog things: books, recordings, objects that cost non-zero amounts of money to make, move, and sell. Therefore, it was inevitable that representations of things we value would have significant marginal costs. And in economies operating efficiently and competitively, – or for that matter, efficiently and non-competitively – there would still be some cost that somebody has to pay at the other end to receive each copy of something of meaning or value, unless there is somebody available to provide a subsidy. And since that was the 20th century reality, it was appropriate to have moral theory which regarded exclusion as an inevitable necessity. The discussion, of course, was about scale. “Ought we to find ways to subsidize more knowledge for more people?”, and the United States became not merely the wealthiest and most powerful country, after the second world war, not merely the indispensable or inevitable country, it became the intellectually most attractive country because it heavily subsidized the availability of sophisticated knowledge to people who could make use of it, even people who came elsewhere from poorer societies, or who had not the money to pay. And after the second world war, in the G.I. Bill, the United States took a unique approach to the age-old problem of how to reduce social disorder after war time through the demobilization of a large number of young men trained to the efficient use of collective violence – a thing which is always worrisome to societies, and which typically produces repression movements post-war, as the society as a whole tries to get back its leverage over those young men – the G.I. Bill was a radical, and indeed productive approach to the problem, namely send everybody to as much education as they want to have, at the expense of the state which is grateful to them for risking their lives in its defense. A splendid system; on the basis of that, and the provision of tertiary and quaternary education to the talented elite of the world, the United Stated government built a special place for its society in the world, as throwing away fewer brains than its power and importance would otherwise have tended to indicate it would do. But we are no longer talking about whether we can save people, identified as the elite of other societies, from the ignorance to which they might otherwise fall prey, through enlightened federal spending. We are talking about eliminating ignorance. We’re talking about addressing the great deprivation of knowledge of everything of use and utility and beauty from everybody, by building out the network across humanity, and allowing everybody to have the knowledge and the culture that they wish to obtain. And we’re talking about doing that because the alternative to doing that is the persistence of an immoral condition. Please watch to see how he continues :)
- tylerneylon 14y agoI'd say the boycott has reached the point of crossing the chasm into adoption by mainstream users. There are still new people signing up all the time, but the pace is low. A bottleneck to mainstream use is the lack of overlap between hackers/devs and people who are most influential in academic publishing, such as senior editors. To developers the question is: if editors want to post their articles on the web, why don't they just do that? To editors, the question is: how can I practically make my journal open access? There is a need for technology to assist in setting up open access journals. Some people are working on solutions, but it's not obvious what that solution will ultimately look like. There is some trial and error happening, and I hope great progress is made while the problem has the attention of the community.
- gnosis 14y ago"There is a need for technology to assist in setting up open access journals." I just hope they don't start hosting them on Facebook.
- anonymouz 14y ago"A bottleneck to mainstream use is the lack of overlap between hackers/devs and people who are most influential in academic publishing, such as senior editors. To developers the question is: if editors want to post their articles on the web, why don't they just do that? To editors, the question is: how can I practically make my journal open access? There is a need for technology to assist in setting up open access journals." That seems pretty far-fetched. Lots of Open Access journals and preprint platforms exist, and there is no evidence that lack of a suitable software platform is a limitation. The problem is more one of those new outlets gaining sufficient reputation to be trusted by more people (and hiring comittees) and figuring out how they should sustain themselves financially. With the more adventurous approaches the main problem is once again coming up with a model that is actually better and then convincing a whole scientific community to drop their current approach and make their careers depend on a new publishing model. Writing the software is easy by comparison.
- jrochkind1 14y ago> how can I practically make my journal open access? There is a need for technology to assist in setting up open access journals. I would like some further clarification of why you believe this is true. The tech to make a journal open access is no harder than the tech to have an online journal with a paywall. Is the issue just that if you go with an existing commercial paywalled publisher, they supply you with tech staff to do it for you, but if you aren't bringing in any income you have to figure out how/who is going to do the tech yourself? That seems potentially legit, but it's not purely a tech issue. There are plenty of open access journals publishing using open source tech -- from tech like OJS (designed for that purpose), to WordPress, to static HTML. I don't think any of the tech solutions produce _great_ UIs -- but then again neither do any of the paywalled UIs, the bar is pretty low, unfortunately. I don't think lack of existence of software is really a barrier. "Who is going to set up and maintain this software if we don't have money to pay them, and our editors aren't techies" is probably a much bigger barrier. But what would be needed to solve that isn't just 'we need technology' -- it would be -- and geez, I can't believe I'm just thinking of this for the first time spurred by your comment (thanks!), a hosted 'software as service' solution, grant-funded, that provides centralized free (or very cheap) hosting to open access journals. Might be a business opportunity there, in fact.
- rumberg 14y agoOff-topic: I updated the sites' design to make it more readable: http://cl.ly/image/3l3M0E320S3m http://cl.ly/image/3l3M0E320S3m