4 ms·

I think I'm right in saying that by emailing you a copy of the PDF, many authors are breaking their contract with the publisher. It's a few years since I publi

by Toenex 14y ago

I think I'm right in saying that by emailing you a copy of the PDF, many authors are breaking their contract with the publisher. It's a few years since I published an academic paper but I've certain signed over my rights more times that I care to recall. So while you can get a copy of the paper from the author officially that is not allowed. Thankfully most academics are not dickheads about this. The key problem with journals is that much of what they do has been made obsolete over the last couple of decades by the move to electronic document distribution and the wonders of the WWW. Don't forget we are talking about private companies restricting the publication of academic research much of which has been funded out of the public coffers. Even the peer review is done, for free by academics. All that is left is the management of the process and distribution of the publications both of which I'd wager could be handled by the communities themselves as beautifully and repeatedly demonstrated by open source software projects. What the journals still retain is essentially kudos, but in a very real sense as academics are largely measured against their publication performance of which the 'currency' is the impact factor of the Journal. Academics need to publish in those Journals with a high impact factor so that their departments get a good rating and thus get more government funding (at least here in the UK). The key will be for a community lead Journal to attain a decent impact factor. Soon.

roel_v 14y ago
Sure, but the kind of 'paper sharing' services such as proposed by the OP have the same problem. Many journals do allow you to share your own article, although I don't know the details by hard nor would I even know where to start looking for the conditions of publishing of my own papers. Your last two paragraphs illustrate my point, or rather the myopic viewpoint that these 'paper liberators' advocate - nobody outside of the HN crowd I know (and yes, this is limited to a few fields) even cares about this supposed 'stranglehold'. Well everybody grumbles every now and then, but at least nobody cares enough to really push for change, and the things people grumble about (slow editors, idiotic formatting requirements, ...) are mostly not solved by 'open access' journals. Everybody has access to their universities' libraries, or contacts the authors themselves, or has some research assistant dig them up for them. Yes yes the subscriptions cost the universities real money, but come on, much more money is wasted by universities on other trivial stuff. Look, I'm not saying the model is perfect, it's just that (IMO) it's not a big enough problem for actual researchers (as opposed to 'interwebs poasters with strong opinions about things they have little use for') to really matter.
- Toenex 14y ago
  I admit I'm not saying that ThePaperBay necessarily offers the right solution but I am refuting your claim that there isn't really a problem. The issue here is that there has always been a problem. Academic output should always have been available to anyone who wanted it _at a fair price_. Until electronic documents became so ubiquitous you could tollerate the constraints of publisher ownership because they helped overcome real problems of communication and physical distribution. The question is haven't we now reached the point where these problems have gone away?
- nitrogen 14y ago
  ...it's not a big enough problem for actual researchers (as opposed to 'interwebs poasters with strong opinions about things they have little use for') to really matter. This division between researchers and everyone else is exactly the kind of elitism that broader access to research is supposed to reduce. People fighting for open access aren't necessarily responding to an existing widespread demand, but anticipating the future benefits to society. They are trying to be ahead of the curve, somewhat like the oft maligned RMS was ahead of the curve with his understanding of and fighting against DRM.
duked 14y ago
The "trick" is to provide a so called draft instead of the paper you have in the IEEE/ACM format, I wrote so called because it's usually the exact same content with a different formating. The only paper you are legally not allowed to share is the one with the publisher's template (LNCS/IEEE/ACM...). If you go to researcher's web page you'll find that most of them just upload a version without using the IEEE/ACM template on their public page to be on the safe side. However many people don't really care and upload the pdf from the proceeding even when they're not supposed to ;)
tehwalrus 14y ago
"breaking their contract with the publisher" I don't believe this is true, generally. of course, it depends exactly what they email you, but if it is a pre-print, that is, the PDF you compiled with LaTeX on your laptop, then there is normally no problem. The publishers only own the copyright to the particular typesetting of the paper (which was originally the useful service they provided academics) and as such, without their special-sauce theme that adds the journal name and page numbers on, it's fine for you to distribute it, host it online for free, etc. (Incidentally, this is also the case with sheet music, which is why it's legal to enter a score into a MIDI program and print it out, but not to photocopy it.) As I say, this is probably not a universal fact, and will depend on what the terms of the journal submission was, and indeed for the book mentioned there was probably a specific contract at some point. Although, if there were small changes between the book and the thesis, the author was probably within her rights to email (and indeed host online) the thesis for free.
- tbeseda 14y ago
  So why don't we make an effort to publish these sorts of pre-prints?
  - pjscott 14y ago
    Some people are making an effort. The ones that spring to mind are http://arxiv.org/ http://arxiv.org/ http://eprint.iacr.org/ http://eprint.iacr.org/ And Google Scholar often turns up pre-prints, making them much easier to find: http://scholar.google.com/ http://scholar.google.com/

by Toenex 14y ago

roel_v 14y ago

Sure, but the kind of 'paper sharing' services such as proposed by the OP have the same problem. Many journals do allow you to share your own article, although I don't know the details by hard nor would I even know where to start looking for the conditions of publishing of my own papers. Your last two paragraphs illustrate my point, or rather the myopic viewpoint that these 'paper liberators' advocate - nobody outside of the HN crowd I know (and yes, this is limited to a few fields) even cares about this supposed 'stranglehold'. Well everybody grumbles every now and then, but at least nobody cares enough to really push for change, and the things people grumble about (slow editors, idiotic formatting requirements, ...) are mostly not solved by 'open access' journals. Everybody has access to their universities' libraries, or contacts the authors themselves, or has some research assistant dig them up for them. Yes yes the subscriptions cost the universities real money, but come on, much more money is wasted by universities on other trivial stuff. Look, I'm not saying the model is perfect, it's just that (IMO) it's not a big enough problem for actual researchers (as opposed to 'interwebs poasters with strong opinions about things they have little use for') to really matter.

Toenex 14y ago
I admit I'm not saying that ThePaperBay necessarily offers the right solution but I am refuting your claim that there isn't really a problem. The issue here is that there has always been a problem. Academic output should always have been available to anyone who wanted it _at a fair price_. Until electronic documents became so ubiquitous you could tollerate the constraints of publisher ownership because they helped overcome real problems of communication and physical distribution. The question is haven't we now reached the point where these problems have gone away?
nitrogen 14y ago
...it's not a big enough problem for actual researchers (as opposed to 'interwebs poasters with strong opinions about things they have little use for') to really matter. This division between researchers and everyone else is exactly the kind of elitism that broader access to research is supposed to reduce. People fighting for open access aren't necessarily responding to an existing widespread demand, but anticipating the future benefits to society. They are trying to be ahead of the curve, somewhat like the oft maligned RMS was ahead of the curve with his understanding of and fighting against DRM.

duked 14y ago

The "trick" is to provide a so called draft instead of the paper you have in the IEEE/ACM format, I wrote so called because it's usually the exact same content with a different formating. The only paper you are legally not allowed to share is the one with the publisher's template (LNCS/IEEE/ACM...). If you go to researcher's web page you'll find that most of them just upload a version without using the IEEE/ACM template on their public page to be on the safe side. However many people don't really care and upload the pdf from the proceeding even when they're not supposed to ;)

tehwalrus 14y ago

"breaking their contract with the publisher" I don't believe this is true, generally. of course, it depends exactly what they email you, but if it is a pre-print, that is, the PDF you compiled with LaTeX on your laptop, then there is normally no problem. The publishers only own the copyright to the particular typesetting of the paper (which was originally the useful service they provided academics) and as such, without their special-sauce theme that adds the journal name and page numbers on, it's fine for you to distribute it, host it online for free, etc. (Incidentally, this is also the case with sheet music, which is why it's legal to enter a score into a MIDI program and print it out, but not to photocopy it.) As I say, this is probably not a universal fact, and will depend on what the terms of the journal submission was, and indeed for the book mentioned there was probably a specific contract at some point. Although, if there were small changes between the book and the thesis, the author was probably within her rights to email (and indeed host online) the thesis for free.

tbeseda 14y ago
So why don't we make an effort to publish these sorts of pre-prints?
- pjscott 14y ago
  Some people are making an effort. The ones that spring to mind are http://arxiv.org/ http://arxiv.org/ http://eprint.iacr.org/ http://eprint.iacr.org/ And Google Scholar often turns up pre-prints, making them much easier to find: http://scholar.google.com/ http://scholar.google.com/