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Who Will Pay For Open Access?
babble123 writes "IEEE is thinking about providing everyone with free access to its publication database (which has saved many a grad student from a trip to the library). The problem is, where will they get the money to fund the journals if not from subscriptions? In this article, they discuss one proposed alternative, 'author-pays,' but they certainly aren't enthusiastic about it, and I don't blame them. And yet, the money has to come from somewhere. Any better ideas?"
Access to this online content is one of the only reasons I keep up my IEEE membership. It's a *lot* of money ($250AU P/A). I would think that the IEEE would suffer greatly when people such as myself fail to renew if this content becomes free.
This isn't about the bandwidth, at least not primarily. The problem is paying the people for doing the editing, etc. Also, getting something published in a scientific journal is a quality criterion. If everything was "put on the net", you wouldn't be able to tell if something really was accepted for publication by an editor and reviewers, or somebody just modified their torrent ...
Another aspect is that of journals being archival. You want those papers to be available forever basically, so relying even on Google or archive.org probably isn't such a great idea.
EagerEyes.org: Visualization and Visual Communication
Why the hell would you compare military spending to the GDP? That doesn't make any sense, unless you are looking for something to dwarf military spending, and there isn't much that does. In fact, GDP is about the only thing that *does* dwarf the US military budget!
Your "reference" page lists the military budget as 49% of the discretionary spending in 2003 (the last year listed). I suspect that that number doesn't even *count* the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which are left out of many budget reports (hey look, we've decreased the budget deficit. All we had to do was not count all the money we spend, wee!).
The US spends more money on the military than every other nation combined (the site you linked to has that number at just above 90% of the rest of the world's spending for 2002, on an upward trend). It's half of US discretionary spending. Only a moron could claim that that's not 'colossal'.
Wait a second... I was under the impression that "the people doing the editing, etc." were other researchers (hence the term "peer review") and weren't getting paid (much) anyway. Haven't there been stories on Slashdot in the past complaining that the publishers of academic journals are useless middlemen as it stands now?
It seems to me that these papers are written for free, peer-reviewed for free, and could very well be hosted on the internet for free. This is really the kind of thing that universities and places like sourceforge and archive.org are designed to handle, and volunteering to help with the production of this knowledge ought to just be part of being a researcher.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
In the machine learning community, one of the most important journal is JMLR http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/. From the beginning, this paper decided to go free, online. As a results, the time to publish were very small, and since reviewing was very strict, the paper quickly gained a high Impact Factor. Now it appears that JMLR is also published as paper volumes. I don't know about their economic model, but surely this success-story shows it is feasible to publish scientific free journals.
Furthermore, many authors (like me) do post a copy (called 'draft' for copyright reasons) of their paper on their webpages. Sometimes some googleing avoids having to pay for scientific journals...
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
has been discussed before.
Steve Harnad posted this to describe the problem. Text reproduced below.
[The following concerns refereed research report publication.]
What is wrong with the following picture?
(1) A brand-new PhD recipient proudly tells his mother he has just
published his first article. She asks him how much he was paid for
it. He makes a face and tells her "nothing," and then begins a long
complicated explanation.
(2) A fellow-researcher at that same university sees a reference to
that same article. He goes to their library to get it: It's not
subscribed to here; can't afford that journal; subscription budget
already overspent.
(3) An undergraduate, same university, sees the same article
cited on the Web; clicks on it. The publisher's website demands a
password: only paid subscribing institutions can have access.
(4) The undergraduate loses patience, gets bored, and clicks on
napster to grab an MP3 file of his favorite bootleg music CD to
console him in his sorrows.
(5) Years later, the same PhD is being considered for tenure; his
publications are good, but they're not cited enough; they have not
made enough of a research impact. Tenure denied.
(6) Same thing happens when he tries to get a research grant: his
research findings have not had enough of an impact: not enough
researchers have read and cited them.
(7) He decides to write a book instead. Publisher declines to
publish it: It wouldn't sell enough copies because not enough
universities have enough money to pay for it -- their purchasing
budgets are tied up paying for their inflating annual journal
subscription costs.
(8) He tries to put his articles up on the Web, free for all, to
increase their impact; his publisher threatens to sue him for
violation of copyright.
(9) He asks his publisher who the copyright is intended to protect.
(10) His publisher replies: You!
What is wrong with this picture? (And why is the mother of the PhD
whose give-away work people cannot steal, even though he wants them
to, in the same boat as the mother of the recording artist whose
non-give-away work they can and do steal, even though he does not
want them to?)
"You can justify anything by putting it in quotes, adding a famous name and making it a sig" - Albert Einstein