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Cutting Out the Middle Men in Scientific Publishing

Posted by michael on from the courage-of-your-beliefs dept.

Black Parrot writes: "Just got a message that was sent to several mailing lists used by machine learning researchers, announcing the mass resignation of the Editorial Board of one prominent ML journal (i.e., the scholars who make a peer reviewed journal work). The reason? 'Times have changed. ... We see little benefit accruing to our community from a mechanism that ensures revenue for a third party by restricting the communication channel between authors and readers.' It's the music industry vs. artists and consumers, writ small. You can see the full text of the message at the UAI archive. This sort of thing has been bubbling for a couple of years. The letter mentions other cases, and I know that several thousand biological researchers have threatened to go on strike against any journal that does not make their articles downloadable for free after a fixed delay from the date of publication. The trend toward more toll booths is not the only force at work in the Internet Age!"

3 of 196 comments (clear)

  1. finally by superflex · · Score: 0, Offtopic
    well, it's about time things like this started happening. nobody should be surprised that it's people involved in the tech industry that are leading the way in this front, because they don't have their heads up their asses.

    It's been espoused here and everywhere else that the cat's out of the bag, and the media industry has been changed forever, blah blah blah, so...

    summary of the discussion about to ensue:

    1. -the times they are a changin
    1. -content is no longer tied to recording medium
    1. -riaa, mpaa, dmca, etc. sucks
    1. -don't take away my fair use rights
    1. -linux rules
    1. -imagine a beowulf cluster of these things
    --
    sigs are for suckers
  2. Riddle by EisPick · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Q: How many grad students does it take to screw in a light bulb?



    A: Just one, but it takes ten years.

  3. Re:Two good things about dead trees by DrSkwid · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    doesn't have to be trees

    other crops make good paper but for some reason the US decided that fast growing cannabis for paper, rope, cloth and cardboard wasn't good enough. Instead we cut down the forests!

    free the weed

    --
    There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter