Slashdot Mirror
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?"
Why don't they just make it available on the net and see what happens.
The net has a reputation for novel ways of propogating data. Maybe servers will be donated. Perhaps a company would sponsor the service. Perhaps bittorrents would work. Perhaps they would be uploaded into sourceforge. Perhaps one could rely on Google caches. Maybe power users, like universities, could mirror their database.
Seriously, put it online, see what the public does.
Philosophistry
I know I have a European bias toward this, but why couldn't the ? I mean, given the huge funds invested in private research (ahem colossal military budget), I am sure this would really be a drop in the bucket but will have great effects.
I mean, why not just put it under a military budget or academia ?
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.
Libraries already pay BIG bucks for overpiced journal subscriptions from for-profit publishers. Not to mention having to build new extensions for all the shelf space.
h tm
If free online journals (aka eprints)
http://www.eprints.org/
can be hosted by the universities and their libraries, the cost will be much less than the present.
See http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.
for details.
This question is hardly unique to the IEEE, all of science publication has been wrestling with these issues for about the last ten years in earnest (esp. since the widespread adoption of the net with viable mechanisms for scientific content delivery (html sucks for equations, but things like pdf make for easy distribution and consumption of papers and paper-like content)). Unfortunately, no good answers have been arrived at that I'm aware of. The professionals in the field want to publish in prestigous journals for their reputations, journals become prestigous in part through extensive peer-review processes and widespread publication, and all that takes time/staff/money. There have been some efforts and opening this process up, spurred by the high costs of institutional subscriptions (like, 20k+ USD per year for some of the chemistry journals I follow :P), but as yet I'm unaware of much adoption because, as mentioned above, an article in "foo.org" is not held in the same weight as one in, say, JACS. It's sort of a self-perpetuating cycle driven by social factors that will be very difficult to fix with technology (esp. given how very set in their ways most of the scientific community is... and I say this as a scientist).
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
Positive and negative feedback needs to come from the output end to get useful results. Feed-forward from the input just creates instability. Early rocket pioneers found that out, which is why Goddard had an engine at the top, and von Braun had to develop complex gyro control systems.
There is an existing model for making access more open while preserving the useful feedback from readers - public libraries. Money goes from the state to authors based on demand for the books.
Imagine the public library which would result from the authors paying for inclusion. Come to think of it we are back to my doormat. I need to go throw away the junk mail and local politician's drivel now so I can open the door to get out to buy some coffee. Anyone have a shovel?
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
Why isn't anyone talking about ADs ?. They are the natural revenue for an online magazine ?. Or maybe advertisements bring in an unwanted commercial touch to this ?.
Of course ADs are not always that forthcoming. But I guess well placed book ads would be enough to solve this problem.
And lastly, why not pick a public sponsor ?. Someone like IBM could sponsor this whole thing without a dent in the budget. Or you could ask for the public to mirror it - if the bandwidth is the real issue (of course, nothing says "COOL" as much as a local mirror of IEEE at your Uni LAN).
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
I'm a IEEE member and they send me so much paper it's downright embarassing. For an organization that should be leading the way into the future, I don't know why they insist on littering my mailbox with so much newsprint and so many envelopes stuffed with important notices about the myriad of ways to spend hundreds of dollars on different stingily selected slices of content.
I worked on a project once where we cooperated with a science journal. They told us that 80% of their costs were in production and distribution of paper. If they could do everything electronically, they could have eliminated that 80%. So my suggestion would be that IEEE do exactly that. Eliminate the paper. It's not like they are going to have to spend more to ramp up a web site with electronic versions of the content, because they already have that entire framework in place. If anything, their current web site is too complicated, and could be simplified (and made cheaper to operate) by eliminating a lot of the built-in toll booths.
Advertising and product placement.
"This cable specification brought to you by Belkin, the choice of the home user"
"Required test equipment: Craftsman digital multimeter model no..."
"Why not take a break from reading this specification and enjoy a cool frappacino - there's probably a Starbucks within 100 yards anyway"
Marketers would gladly pay to for full page advertising to the target market that downloads these documents.
With popups and banner ads! The Internet was raised on these mediums so they must still work. Also, with all those words, think how good AdSense would work!
_ WEATHER_ON_YOUR_COMPUTER_WHILE_NAKED_STRIPPERS_DAN CE_ON_YOUR_DESKTOP!" prompts and they would be rolling in the dough!
Toss in a couple "CLICK_YES_TO_USE_THIS_SITE_FOR_FREE_AND_GET_FREE
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
/)
While I doubt it will happen, things like this should be funded by the government as it provides a huge benefit to society. It allows people to increase their own education and allows others to build off the existing pool of knowledge. Education, research, and making academic information available to everyone should be the most important interest of the government, not near the last.
Even more so for content that is "dense", that is, a lot of information in a small file. A Scientific paper is maybe a single MB or two, and contains a lot of information (it is "dense"), a movie in contrast is a GB or more, and is frequently only entertainment for an hour and a half.
I consider it extremely likely that simply *allowing* distribution will be enough, the net will take care of the rest by itself.
It's harder if you insist that distribution takes place only from *your* servers, and forbid redistribution, but in that case your problems are of your own making.
The likes of IBM, Sun, MS, Oracle, et al could all contribue what to them would be a pitance. So long as all the big companies were involved, there wouldn't be any undue influence by any one of them
In my humble opinion, they don't need to open up their library to everyone. Sure, it is useful, but it is mostly useful for a certain technical and professional crowd. This is not a library that the majority of the public will care about. Those for whom this library is relevant should afford to pay their IEEE membership costs, as $250 p/a is not much compared to many other disciplines and professions. Those in Academia such as students can use their Academic libraries; the IEEE does not need to subsidize Academic institutions and education.
torrents for the data/documents themselves would be a brilliant idea, and use of bittorrent technology... for the trackers and web servers, if they could get $10 a year for an account on the system (not quite free), or even a donation link for $10 as a suggested donation, that could cover bandwidth costs...
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
This is more likely to be something people use once in a while. I avoided it at university because I could be bothered to go to the library, where I could read journals for free. But if the articles where much cheaper, I probably would have indulged, and I would probably still be reading them now that I don't have that library access... Just a thought.
In order to gain access to publish, require the authors to participate (no pay) in the peer review process much like moderators on Slashdot (but more formalized). Then have a meta peer review process to back that up. You get free peer reviewing by requiring authors to do some of that to continue to publish. But unlike Slashdot, the mod points would go to verified degreed people in academic or other research areas who would be selected first early access to do the reviews. When an article is submitted, distribute it to randonly selected reviewers. Then if it's not completely shot down, follow up with more review cycles until the reviewer sample size gives a good ranking.
Do the actual distribution via BitTorrent, with the article in the clear, but cryptographically signed by the prestigious journal. The journal's web site would have the abstracts, links, and public key.
It's not totally paid for this way, but the cost of distribution gets covered, and peer reviewers come free.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
>I am willing to cough up $10-20 bucks for access to a single IEEE publication.
To me, there is a big difference between $10 and $20 for a publication. One is cheap; the other is something I would have to think about.
Why?
Because there are about a bazillion IEEE publications. You have to multiply your $20 times however many interests you have. That is part of their problem. People aren't interested in only specific areas like, say, low-temperature applications of nanotechnology on organic substrates in transitional gravity environments with ionizing radiation. They have other interests, too. The IEEE publications get so specific and narrow it would take all your time just to decide which subscriptions to buy for the year, even assuming you did have a budget to do so.
How are we supposed to come up with a good solution if we don't even know the scope of the problem?
ie:How much money are we talking about here?
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
If the group you are trying to help is college students, they do not usually need knowledge about the latest trends. Most non-research university programs are behind the cutting edge.
People will still pay for a subscription for new content and new information about new and emerging technologies. IEEE simply needs to stagger out the release of issues to free access by some period. I think 6 months makes sense. The magazines being released are outdated enough to justify the subscription, but new enough to help people researching for school.
Archival versions of the articles is a poor income source. Often these articles are availible in library backcopies, microfilm, or a magazine archiving service (ex. ProQuest). By allowing people free access they encourage people to understand new technologies, as well as considering older ones.
I have a tricky idea for funding the hosting/bandwidth itself:
When i buy aninternet connection, i pay basically for bandwidth. There are plans for GB downloaded, and others for bandwidth.
So what if we would interpret the price of the bandwidth not only as a price for the download speed, but as a price for the content?
- When an end user pays for bandwidth, they would pay for the data transfer service, and also for the content coming. Also if he provides outgoing content, that gets deducted.
- When a content provider connects to the internet (like IEEE), he pays for the bandwidth, and also for the net consumed content. (he will provide more, so the net will be in his favour)
- When two ISPs build an interconnect/peering, they buy the bandwidth, and also have some king of Giro/clearing for the net content provided.
This would encourage all to provide content and provide income to the net contributors. Of course not all content worths the same ber MB, but there still would be paysites.
What do you think?
vajk
Dear IEEE,
Please don't look to advertising.
Thanks,
A random IEEE member.
---
IEEE has a reputation of impartiality. If they do open their doors to ad revenue their integrity will be questioned. The last thing we need is corporate sponsored standards and reference material which shut out competitors and amateurs.
Even if they do stay impartial, they will be questioned and it will lead to a whole quagmire of politics. It is inevitable.
I know this comment doesn't help much, but I had to say it. I commend the IEEE for trying to make reference material avilable free, but please think about this. Anyway, I don't think IEEE will read this, so bleh.
StrayByte.Net
The way I understand it, a torrent makes downloading the popular files faster and the not-so-popular files stay stagnating at the botttom.
Given that the information at this place is likely to be of interest to exactly 8 people on the planet, one wonders whether this is the way to go.
Disclaimer : I know very little about the way torrents work now - things have probably changed. Also there are probably a whole lot of people to whom this information is useful. However, I believe that each person is likely to be looking up very specialised information.
Why not have IEEE turn into a non-profit foundation (like Mozilla) and get the industry to sponsor it? Research is important, and access to research even more so. Google knows - and their sponsorship for Wikipedia shows it.
Just
Just put a hot babe poster on it and sell it. Just geeks read interviews on playboy, right?
As a side effect, it'll boast teenagers interest in research.
...The author pays a bit over $100 a page for the major US journals. You budget for it in your grants. Still, we have subscriptions at huge cost, despite very common free preprint servers. My colleagues in many other fields don't pay, and the universities do. Yes, I agree there should be a better model.
Professor of Astronomy, Author of Spider Star & Star Dragon (Tor)
My government pay me for research work. I write articles (and with LaTeX, presentation is OK. No need to have somebody do it again.) I refer articles. My government is already paying so that I can read papers written by colleagues working in the same national entity as me. (That's unbelievable.)
In short, my government is already paying several times editors: they pay me while I'm refering other's papers, when I want to publish in some journals and when I want to read other's papers. Editors provide very little. Now that we can live without paper versions (I already prefer having PDFs) their job is over. It'll take time, but they are going to disappear unless they join with national resarch organizations and provide free access to anybody. It is a configuration where everybody wins: governments pay less, editors survive in a different form where they only care about having the papers refered by the right persons.
You both seem to have ignored the article if you think that distribution costs are the only costs, being discussed, associated with academic publication...
xxx.arxiv.org arXiv has been funded almost exclusively by Los Alamos National Laboratory. There are mirrors all arround the world provided by various universities. Authors do the formatting in latex, and the papers get compiled and downloaded automatically. What is missing in this case is quality control, which again could be done by authors of other papers, as is the case with susbscription journals. An automatic peer review system could be a good solution to this problem. I'm sure that funding for this kind of project can be found, either from universities or directly from government grants.
Million dollar sig.
I wouldn't mind paying for the few IEEE docs I've wanted - if the prices were reasonable. I'm willing to bet that if they'd just lower the prices to something approximating reasonable, they'd see sales improve.
I mean, once they've converted them to binary format for download, what are their expenses really?
--- Asking inconvenient questions for over 30 years...
The professionals in the field want to publish in prestigous journals for their reputations, journals become prestigous in part through extensive peer-review processes and widespread publication, and all that takes time/staff/money.
It takes time but not money. In my field (CS/AI) the reviewers, editors and authors aren't paid for their work. And they do wonder where all the money goes that publishers collect.
As for adoption, it's certainly happened. Two examples: Journal of AI Research (www.jair.org) and Journal of Machine Learning Research (www.jmlr.org) are both prestigious web-published journals, with citation statistics at the top of the field.
Being published in a web journal is not the same as throwing a paper up on your web site. Papers still go through an extensive review and editing process.
In the end, it's the reviewers and editors who determine the quality of a journal, not the publisher.
Even if we assume that BT4 could reduce the IEEE's bandwidth costs to zero (it can't- they still need a tracker), then there are still costs of publication that have not been addressed, such as editing, compilation, peer-reviewing, etc. The problem is much broader than bandwidth.
Add in that BT4 would only offer a very questionably sized benefit: the IEEE would be transferring files on the order of 10s of MB, not the hundreds which BT typically helps. Furthermore, the files being offered are likely of such a specialized interest compared to the relatively broad interest that most Linux ISOs enjoy.
In light of these factors, it becomes clear that the optimal solution must be social and/or economic in nature, not purely technological.
#define DRM chmod 000
Let O'Reilly access to a small fraction of this content so they can test for interest in their online book subscription service. If the geeks flock to it, O'Reilly will see it as a way to give their product more visibility and they can license the rest.
Pedro
----
The Insomniac Coder
For the most part, academic journals are not and have never been cash cows. Many of them exist on the fringes of profitability. Many keep their expenses down by skimpling on payment to editors, peer-reviewers and authors. In my field, academics do all these tasks (even to the point of delivering camera-ready material) and receive no compensation beyond a line in the CV. And right now, editing and peer-reviewing CV lines are not the way to success in any field. Universities value and pay for the results, but not those who generate them.
If they slashed their prices to increase the volume, would subscriptions increase? I highly doubt it. Even if I could afford them, I would subscribe to few journals, and the publishers would make less money, not more.
Making authors pay for the editing costs is likewise dumb. Uh, in some fields, such as mine, we don't get much grant money at all. Finding an extra $3000 is rather hard when we're lucky to get someone to pay for us to give a paper at a conference.
Preserving open access and the quality of peer review is going to be difficult. But the model is: open production -> critical publication -> open access. Open production and Open Access should not be mutable parts of the equation: that's how the scientific process works. Ideally, we need people who can freely submit their findings, theories and interpretations unfettered by financial, political, institutional or social obstacles, and we need people who can access that information without such obstacles either. The filtration provided by academic journals is a valuable service, but one that incurs real cost. And someone's got to cover that.
mutatis mutandis, you could say the same about Open Source Software.
Electronic journals and proceedings are already creating a 'vanity press', as discussed, and this is not being driven by 'author-pays', but (seemingly) by publishers' 'panning for gold' approach (i.e. accept a broad range of fledging publications and see which makes it).
Speaking as a (publically-funded) publishing academic, I think that author-pays is a valid potential model and (in the UK at least), as it will raise the bar for high-quality 'traditional' publications over the existing electronic ones. Furthermore practices like the Research Assessment Exercise will apply pressure to maintain the high quality of these journals (IEEE are not going to throw away their reputation in this current reality and its extension).
If only Digital rights managment software actually worked what they could do is distribute files for free that expire 1 month after the download. Then libraries could pay for both hardcopies and digital copies without any kind of DRM attached. This would still give almost all the benefits of having an open system while still allowing the journals to get the money they need to survive.
--aiee
There are many ways this can work. Authors already pay, for many journals. Advertisements are another source of income. Membership fees (as in Science, the journal published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science) can also help. Finally, and most importantly, most universities and libraries need subscriptions for archival purposes and can afford to pay. The individual reader is fine with PDFs online.
Several journals use honest policies that I like: (a) time limit, get all articles older than 1 year or 6 months free (b) get all original research articles free and only pay for reviews/editorials/comments (most ethical solution, because original research is not paid by the journal)
P.
Google Ads?
If you belong to an institution and you need access to publications to carry out your work than the institution is supposed to pay subscriptions.
If you are an hobbist who happens to read research papers than you bring your butt to the next university library.
The only purpose of having freely availeble research papers in electronic form is to allow masses to access to it. But what for?...
I used to be a member but stopped my subscription a few years ago after a series of particularly poor articles. I remember two:
The first was Elliot Wave Theory being reported as some sort of be-all for financial markets.
The second was some grad with a report on his really low-quality applet that would download pictures in the background so that they would be ready in your browsers cache for when you visited linked pages on the site.
*thwock!* *groan* *crash* A horrible roar fills the cave, and you realize, with a smile....
Umm.. why are you comparing the military budget to GDP? Strangely enough most people think the military budget is huge because it's a large percentage of federal spending. GDP has nothing to do with that, other than being a number that the military spending is small in comparison with. I find your entire argument to be patently dishonest.
AccountKiller
Give it away for free and make up for it in volume!
"But I'm still right here, giving blood and keeping faith. And I'm still right here."
In terms of fairness, I think getting people who cite an IEEE paper to pay something to the IEEE would be a reasonable solution since they have clearly benefited from reading that article.
But of course, it is not easy to implement. It is also a negative incentive to citing that paper which is bad since the one thing authors want is to be cited.
It would also be nice if the journal will wavier some fees for independent researchers. Also, to reiterate, most grants will eventually have a little textbox to stipulate how much is needed for "journal submission payments".For the first 10 years or so it might be a hard sell, but eventually full access journals (including for the public who pay for it all anyway) paid by research grants and universities is really the only way to go.
Ciao
I guess my problem is that I simply cannot see how the author-pays model would become more expensive for a university/organization.
Reality or nothing.
Currently it's easier for me to get a copy of a Metallica mp3 than to get a research paper who's author would really like me to read it. But that's changing.
The cost of preparing a single item for a journal is at least $500+. Don't forget that for every item accepted for a (good) journal, up to ten are rejected. Then there is the costs of proof reading and type-setting. Advertising is unlikely to provide $500 per article, when some articles are probably relevant to less than 500 experts in the world.
Somebody has to pay that, it's either the university libraries subscribing to the journal, or the research projects budgets in the author-pays model. In an author pays model there should also be some overcharge so that really good work from unfunded researchers (such as those in the third world) can make it in.
It's true that some journals will be nothing more than vanity publishing, and will accept anything. But being published in such a journal will not be desirable as they will not have the same "impact" as well respected journals.
The current model and author-pays both have the same approximate cost to the tax payer, except that one provides more short and long term benefits to the world scientific community. The funny thing about reasearchers in a poor university in the middle of Africa is that they're just as smart as people in more developed countries. It's insane that they do not have access to the current state of research.
I expect that we'll see some very interesting author-pays models coming out of developing nations, as the primary costs are staff time, not technichal resources, and staff time is the thing they have as much of as us. Just slower PCs.
Christopher Gutteridge
University of Southampton
Maintainer of GNU EPrints - research archiving software: http://software.eprints.org/
How about limiting the amount of free articles you can download to say 1 a day, with limitless downloads to subscribers?
:-)
That way people who are just curious get access and those who use it for research would still need a subscription. That way universities would still be required to pay for subscriptions, but students who just need to get a copy of a particular paper can get them from anywhere.
Also, with the use of scholar.google.com many papers that are on IEEE are often cached elsewhere as well anyway
Warning, comments may not have been passed by the sanity department of my brain.
Another problem is surely that some countries are richer than others. A US scientist would be able to publish so much more than an Indian scientist of the same calibre.
And yet another is that of the country's government deciding which of its scientists gets to publish.
Sounds awfully much like plan economy to me.
What are their costs exactly? The peer review is done for free by professors (usually their grad students and then rubber staamped by the professor), the submitters generally submit camera-ready .pdf files, and bandwidth and hosting can't be too much of a problem - archive.org does much more with much less.
Why should it cost more than ~$200 per article for the lifetime of the article? I estimate that there is approximately $100 in costs in sending out the stuff to review (stamps and the like), and then $1 / year should be enough to host the average paper in perpetuity forever, and it's really easy to invest the remaining $100 to make $1 per year.
Perhaps they are more interested in perpetuating the IEEE as large bureaucracy when open access hits them, rather than than in open access per se...
Such an issue is a common one:
The non-profiting resource is obviously of great benefit to society and the country at large, helping to provide a poole of knowledgable people who can help society in this field.
Just like with all the similar things which serve society but do not make a direct profit the federal government, and therefor indirectly everyone, should contribute to maintaining a resource which is indirectly of use to everyone.
Tapering the cost with time would also be a good idea, IMO. That way you avoid a "muggins first" mentality, where customers wait for one another to buy the last few subscriptions.
Wikileaks, no DNS
In the field of AI we have at least two highly respected journals which do not have paper editions (even though libraries can buy bound collections of papers on a yearly basis) and which make their content available for free to everyone:
Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research and
Journal of Machine Learning Research
This works because an academic journal does not really have any expenses for peer-review. Academics review for free as part of their job - it gives status to review for a prestigious journal. If you don't have any costs for editing and printing a paper edition, you suddenly have almost no operating expenses at all. Cost of bandwith is negligible. A typical research paper in pdf format is a 100k download, so any one of us could operate one of those servers from our home. Furthermore, the cost of bandwith is continually decreasing.
In sum, I don't understand what the IEEE is whining about. Let those who want a journal on paper pay for the paper, and let the rest of us have it for free!
IEEE, has already gone "Green" -- i.e., it is among the 78% of publishers (publishing 92% of the 8950 journals surveyed to date) who have already given each of their authors the green light to provide open access to their own articles, if they wish, by self-archiving them in their own institutional OA archives. IEEE is now contemplating also going "Gold" -- i.e., becoming one of the 5% of publishers that are open-access publishers, making all of their articles open-access (and many of them recovering their costs by charging the author-institutions for publication by the article instead of charging the user-institutions for access by the journal or article). Going Gold is not without an element of risk, so IEEE are to be highly commended if they actually decide to try it, but let us not foget that, being already green, IEEE are already on the side of the angels! It is the authors (and their institutions and funders) -- i.e., the research community itself, the very ones for whom the benefits of open access are being sought -- who are to blame for not yet going when the going is Green, by self-archiving their own articles so as to make them open access. Relief may be on the way there too, however, in the form of a proposed new recommendation to the 55 major research institutions worldwide who have signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access" that they should now implement an explicit Institutional Self-archiving Policy of providing open access to their own research article output. (A summary will appear in the March issue of D-lib magazine.) Two recent international surveys have found that whereas most authors do not yet self-archive, 79% will do so willingly, but only if and when they are required to do so by their employers and/or funders.
In most scientific publication the setup is that the author pays via their research support ("many times tax dollars at work") and open access is still denied. The problem may arise where the author(s) lack such external funding.
Most authors of IEEE papers already have access to the IEEE database, which somebody (e.g. a university library or research institution) is already paying for. So the funding issue could easily be managed merely by most institutions shifting some funds from the library to the EEE faculty.
The actual amount of money is not the real problem. The real issue, as far as scientific integrity is concerned, is whether this brings up a conflict of interest. I'm sure that can be managed, (peer review is already anonymous) but it is important for them to lay down guidelines about it now, to avoid the conflict of interest from the start.
Why don't they use micropayments? Even starving students should be able to afford 25c.
Reduce the price and publicize the hell out of it.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Alright I know alot of people are going to be suggesting hokey solutions where no real person pays (or at least no one they know). Yet someone needs to pay for these journals and while editors and reviewers are likely to work very cheaply if not for free many of these journals need some staff and some money to encourage reviewers and boards. Unfortunatly, if we keep using the current system alot of people don't get any access (they aren't subscribers) yet no one benefits. The authors would like to reach a larger audience and it doesn't cost ieee anything for them to read the magazine either (at least not more than banner ads bring in).
This is essentially a tragedy of the commons problem. Imagine what would happen if we tried to pay for national parks and forests entierly via usage fees and if you didn't pay for your camp permit or wilderness pass you couldn't use the area. Now perhaps a few tourist destinations might be accesible because of volume but probably the high prices would mean only the wealthy and dedicated could afford to use the forests and everyone loses. In short the private property model is really great at distributing goods which aren't duplicable (marginal cost is a large fraction of total cost per item) but goods which can be shared like parks and information is better supported by the people as a whole.
How could such a system work? Simple, an internet version of the library tax used in uk and canada. Basically the government or sub contracted companies (this could be competitive and you could probably download from amazon and have just as much privacy protection as now) would record how frequent journals/books/whatever are used (and perhaps an estimation of how useful it was by the reader) and then compensate the author proportionatly.
I know the standard reaction is to think this couldn't possible hand out money in the 'right' amounts. Yet this is just because you are stuck in the mindset that this is really property. There are no right amounts, or if there are we are far from them. When the most valuable and time consuming works (technical works, textbooks, high art) are generally the least profitable while novels make tons of money. In short we don't need to be very accurate to make sure books and journals get written just so long as we are in the ballpark of more readers=more money.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Whoring out ( or sponsorship for the politically correct ) always works !
The future is almost certainly going to see the authors, their institutions and their grant-awarding bodies fund a greater share of the costs of publishing papers in the IEEE publications and elsewhere. I don't know how well the IEEE will handle this inevitable transition in its sources of income but, overall, a move to free access would be a very good thing for the mission of the IEEE.
Scroogle
I dont know how many people here feel some kind of a Deja vu!
The U.S. Congress set us on this road in 1982, when it created a centralized appellate court for patent cases called the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. A decade later, Congress ordered that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO), which up until then had been funded by tax revenues, instead fund itself through application and maintenance fees. Both changes were described as administrative and procedural rather than substantive.
From my thought store
So, it is certainly a bad idea!
Some improvements over the existing system should be thought about, rather than this.
Senthil
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
I'm a med student. The British Medical Association has made its journal, BMJ, available for free for a number of years. This is a world-leading medical journal - up there with The Lancet and NEJM - provided completely gratis to anybody and everybody. You can search, download PDFs, do anything you want really. Doctors (and students) still pay their membership fees. If the BMA can manage it, the IEEE certainly can.
The Budapest Open Access Initiative has discussed possible business models in their FAQ.
There are also links on that page for other approaches.
"You can justify anything by putting it in quotes, adding a famous name and making it a sig" - Albert Einstein
The review process is by no means free. The peer reviewers have to be specialists in the field the article discusses. Sometimes, there are only two or three such peers world wide and they are just as hard working as the author. If you want them to sit down and think about an article they didn't write for a day, you have to pay them.
Apart from that: "Author pays" is a really bad method. It keeps young authors from publishing frequently (since they're on a budget).
Face it: For a peer-review process, some money is needed. It either comes from the author, which is bad, see above; from the readers, which is still better, since Universities -- the mayor subscribers -- have more money than the individual author; or from some third party, which is always a problem since it raises the problem of this third entities interests in publications. Example: Who is going to pay for a journal of Egyptian Studies, as opposed to one for Silicon Technology?
The system of peer-reviewed publication lies at the heart of the modern scientific community. Sure, it's not perfect. The huge number of contemporary journals is a big problem for university libraries. But I don't see a better solution for the moment. But it would help if the journals would cut costs by, e.g., publishing only electronically, although I don't know how much of the price of the journal is actually accountable to printing.
for the entire scientific literature. For IEEE it's probably on the order of $100 million/year.
Energy: time to change the picture.
I don't see the problem you are spotting. Government funded research expects the researchers to publish. So they're already funding authoring papers. Why would suddenly a government prevent scientists from publishing if they will have to foot another bill? Especially if this means that their entire country gets free access to international research, bringing the cost of maintaining an up to date library way down?
Most subscriptions for scientific journals go to smaller institutions or commercial organizations that don't publish much. If you put the burden of payment on authors, then that shifts the distribution of payments from small institutions and commercial organizations to the big research universities and labs. The big guys are suddenly realizing that the small places have been subsidizing the publication of their scientific work, and they don't want to give that up.
Energy: time to change the picture.
It might seem to the uninitiated that societies like the IEEE are unbiased on the issue of open access, but they are about as biased about open access as Microsoft is about Linux. The fact is, while being "non-profit", these societies (and particularly their staff), make tons of money off journals. There was a a scandal recently when the head of a similar society, the ACS, was shown to be making $750,000/year. Therefore, they spread FUD about open access. They don't care about science; it's the bottom line they care about, and open access threatens those cushy salaries.
The standard myths about open access just aren't true. There aren't people doing worthwhile science that can't afford to publish it. Even in the third world scientists are supported by grants. Author payment is the logical way to fund scientific publication. Heck, the IEEE *itself* charges page fees (basically the same thing) for papers published in its conference proceedings (and then turns around and charges twice!) . And it's not like the authors have to pay out of their own pockets -- just like attending conferences, grants can be used. And it's a trivial part of the grant. Typical grants these days are hundreds of thousands of dollars or even millions. The $1500 needed to publish a paper in PLoS is a trivial cost compared to the cost of doing science (such as equipment, supplies for experiments, and paying grad student and postdoc salaries). What isn't trivial is the millions of dollars a year a typical university has to pay in journal subscriptions to "closed access" journals. The universities win with open access , the public wins (the get to see what their taxes pay for), the scientists win (more people read their papers) . The only losers are the publishers of closed access journals. Boo hoo hoo!
The truth is, many folks sitting on these boards are locked into a mindset--Print Article in Prestigious Journal = Credibility++, Electronic Article in Online Prestigious Journal = 0. Nevermind that by the time an article hits print, it's a year or more old (in some cases, two years old!) and, in a field like IT, probably obsolete. Thus, the print journals serve as a sort of "fossil record" of where the field has been, but it's also useful for professors hoping to move up the er..Ivory ladder. I think this problem will go away eventually as the old codgers die off, but professors are infamous for refusing to retire, and senility is something of a virtue, it seems.
As far as what IEEE is looking at now, I'd say the best thing is to do what others have already suggested and allow others to mirror the site. Perhaps they could release everything under a CC license. I agree that editing is important; however, there is an important source of revenue already in place (conference fees, membership dues). Despite what one person says, many, many people aren't going to cancel their membership just because they can get the articles for free. They already have to pay a large fee to present/attend the conferences, and membership looks good (and is even essential) on many CVs. Finally, most professors are pretty damn ethical (almost to a fault). They'll want to support their professional organization, and many feel strongly about making their articles freely available anyway (after all, they don't get paid!)
Many print journals already charge authors steep publication fees. This is especially apparent in the medical field. We're talking about authors shelling out hundreds and possibly even thousands of dollars to an editor before she'll publish the article. Aw, poor author, right? Actually, it doesn't matter one whit to the author, because the publication expenses are covered by the grant he received to conduct the research. The same is most often true for his journal subscriptions and membership dues.
Many journals are subsidized by universities, others are subsidized by private or corporate donors. Plenty of journals also have advertisements, though these ads are much lower-key than magazine ads.
Chances are, IEEE could garner support from universities, corporations, private donors, author payments, and advertisers with no problem.
What about ads? Stick some scantilly clad women in there and some good articles, kind of like Maxim or FHM, and you'll have a winning solution.
Open Access finally arrives at IEEE, after it is being discussed since years in the biomed field (where access is crucial for developing countries).
Some info at the Budapest Open Access Initiative (http://www.soros.org/openaccess/.
For me as a scientist, I still have to get used to that, but everygrant has a part for publication expenses, often not used or used just to buy offprints. If I think at the library budget devoted to subscriptions at my university, well, that money can be easily spent for paying publication instead.
I know all the academic types would scoff at such a plan, but it may be very easy to generate a respectable amount of income. Ticket sales should not be restricted to members only.
The logistics could be hammered out with endless blue ribbon committee meetings.
I used to be a member of the IEEE, I felt the dues were way too high for what you got.
Just a thought. Go ahead and throw your stones now.
I know that with the current political climate, making those who benefit most from our institutions and infrastructure is unfashionable... but a tax on all companies engaged in electrical or electronic businesses.
A governing board of the IEEE could be consulted on the definition of who these businesses are and they would be taxed proportionally to a formula that took into account their revenues and profits and the needs of the IEEE.
After all, that is de facto how the NIST works... only it's called a fee.
My forty-something dollar membership to the APA gets me a stack of journals every year, which promptly go on my shelf unless something I'm interested in is prominently displayed on the cover. My colleagues do the same. None of us are interested in everything, and when we're doing research on a topic, we turn to the online databases anyway. The journals are a waste perpetuated by the self-protecting, prestige-hungry bureaucracy.
"Print is dead." -- Egon Spangler
I just finished a length research paper. It was extremely satisfying when I clicked on a link in Google and was told "Welcome University of Pittsburgh. Your organization maintains access to this journal" and I was given full access to the paper immediately. Contrast this with "This paper is not available online. Print this sheet and take it to the library." Certainly, there is no monetary reason why all papers could not be available to someone on a University IP address or capapble of VPN'ing into a university account. The universities pay their fees without complaining, and it's not like there is an issue of those without access trying to steal the journals -- the only ones who would want access anyways are those on university IP's.
The parent doesn't understand what "author pays" means. It doesn't mean that the author can publish whatever he or she wants -- the articles have to go through peer review exactly like "reader pays" journals. The only difference is that anyone can access the final product.
There are actually several problems:
One is the cost per article of publishing research. This would probably be the same regardless of where you are coming from. But a researcher costs much less to maintain (salary, office space etc.) in a poor country than in a rich country - and this must be so in order for the poor countries to have any competitiveness. So the net result is that the number of articles any one researcher would be allowed to publish would be smaller in a poor country than in a rich country. Which is fundamentally at odds with the whole idea of peer-review systems, that whether an article is published or not is dependent on the quality of the research and the presentation of it, and nothing else.
I am here assuming that governments are introducing some sort of systems for endorsing articles they are willing to pay for. A justifiable assumption, as it is unlikely that many governments are willing to pay an unpredictable amount of money for something they have no control over.
Which leads us to other problems. Such as what to do if you are not employed by a university, but unemployed or employed by a private corporation. (I published an article while I was unemployed and working from home, and this was essential in getting me my PhD studentship.) Or if your employer doesn't like the research you do. Or if your country doesn't like the research you do (Iran might be unwilling to pay for publishing research in evolutionary biology or gender studies, and the US might be unwilling to pay for applied marxism or similar.) Or if you are collaborating with the "wrong" people in th wrong countries.
And what if your country refuses to take part at all in international systems like this?
In short, how would this system work if you're an unemployed genius working in Zimbabwe?
In my views, the proposed system has all the problems of a plan economic system, and not even a semblance of fairness.
From what I can understand, the models that has worked best is to have a blackout period. Turns out that pros are really interested in papers about a year old. Older stuff gets dated. Therefore to keep up your research library still needs to subscribe but it's free for everyone if it's old enough.
This way the journals still make their money on subcriptions and the information is freely available at some point. It's not clear that this is the final model that has been settled on but it's on out there for the moment.
While the copy editors may be bad, and while the majority of the reviewing is done by peers, there is still very important jobs that you need good top-level editors for:
- Throwing out the complete garbage, crackpottery, etc: seeing if the author exists, is at a real institution, etc.
- Finding people to peer-review the article. This is not easy; it's often difficult to find 3 or 4 good people in the right sub-field who don't actually have a connection to the work. This means the editor has to understand the article to begin with.
- Dealing with fraud, plagurism, etc. Not easy.
You want smart, well-educated people for these jobs. And then you still need copy editors, layout, indexing, administration, etc etc, which don't come free.
Yes, you still need money to run a reputable journal. But it's also clear that it's time for a change, and that the subscription model simply doesn't work very well anymore. What we really need is someone to fund the peer-review process, and then web-based citations, indexing, archiving, and retrieval of articles.
Unfortunately it's not that simple. Many would argue that the 'user pay' systems doesn't work. First, much of the research published is paid for by government grants via taxes, so taxpayers are paying for the "privilege" of reading about research they already paid for themselves. Second, the goal of disseminating research results is the progress of society, so that people can learn from each other's work. With the user pays approach, only the rich or "connected" (e.g., paid for by employer) can afford it. Libraries are an option for some, but not everybody lives near a university, not every university offers public access, and libraries obviously don't have all journals. My former university library stopped getting many journals (too expensive) and instead joined a program where you could order in articles from other libraries for free, as long as you were a grad student at the university.
I'm not sure there is an ideal model for every case. I know I wouldn't have even a fraction of the papers I've read now if I had to pay for them myself. Citeseer has been a big help, and they seem to get by ok. Of course they don't publish their own (just a search for papers with links) and they get funded through sponsors, grants, donations, and have volunteers.
Just opening the coffers is not practical, I know, I used to work on journals for the American Chemical Society. Some have said electronic submission and distribution to reviewers cost nothing, but these are custom made programs that handle this, and what about copy editing, layout, art, graphics. You won't believe the number of low res pictures researchers think can be published. So what to do. There should tiers of subscriptions. For instance, I would love to read papers on certain subjects, so for $5 a month let me look at 2 papers from Journal X (online only). That way, when a article on thin films shows up in JACS (Journal of the American Chemical Society), I could sign up for, inexpensive, occasional access and be happy. But for langumire (which is about films) I could buy the expensive all access pass since I know I would use it. Bundling these would also be good. Say your member ship in ACS or IEEE would give you access to 10 articles a month in whatever journal online. Sounds good to me, would solve some of the problems I believe. Also authors should have unlimited access for ever on their own papers. One more suggestion, if the government really wants articles from gov funded research freely available, I say let the original, un peer reviewed paper be free, and get the final one payed for. Then people woudl see how much work is involved in making them into publishble papers. Also, this might improve the quality of papers submitted. rambled on enough.... Journals are publishing departments outsourced so professors don't have to know how to do it. Its cheaper, more poeple can afford it, and maybe more people will subscribe to journals that are slightly outside their area of expertise to see the
And I disagree with your criticism of author-pays. For most academic institutions, a publication at a quality conference or major journal is worth much more than $1500 in research funding - which is what it costs to publish in a Public Library of Science journal. In any case, if you have a paper accepted to a conference, you have to go to present it. If the conference is in another country (and if you're not American, they usually are), it's very likely to cost more than $1500 to pay the conference entry fee, the hotel, the airfare, and so on.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I can see the charge for their other publications, but I believe they should allow free public access to their standards. They allow it for some of their 802 standards now. Publications, such as journals, etc, are a different matter entirely, and I could even see charging for access to pre-standard documents. However, once something is accepted as a IEEE standard it should be made public.
- there is still very important jobs that you need good top-level editors for:
These are all things which could be checked very quickly without any editor by peer reviewers.- Throwing out the complete garbage, crackpottery, etc: seeing if the author exists, is at a real institution, etc.
- - Finding people to peer-review the article. This is not easy; it's often difficult to find 3 or 4 good people in the right sub-field who don't actually have a connection to the work. This means the editor has to understand the article to begin with.
The process of finding independent peer-reviewers could itself be well handled by peer review.- - Dealing with fraud, plagurism, etc. Not easy.
Dealing with fraud, plagiarism is the easy part -- identifying it when it occurs is the hard part and editors are usually not the ones who identify fraud and plagiarism - it's peers who spot almost all such problems.Scroogle
As others have said in this thread, this is an old problem. Interestingly, other professional societies have generally dealt with this reasonably well. Both the American Physical Society and the American Chemical Society assess page charges from the authors to help cover costs, as well as modest subscription costs from libraries.
Even though there are free archives of preprints, where content is available publicly, people are still willing to pay a little for the stamp of peer-review. Certainly one could imagine an automated system that would distribute manuscripts to appropriate referees at comparatively little cost, but you have to remember that not all "peers" view refereeing as good citizenship. Many view it as a burden, not unlike jury duty.
Finally, let's keep our eyes on the big picture: it's typically for-profit publishing houses , not professional societies, that squeeze libraries for every penny, have outrageously inflated page charges, and generally lower quality and standards.
The problem is that there is not enough perceived value to the real end-users (the researchers) in the editors' work of editing and proofreading to stop those end-users demanding to cut out the middlemen (the editors and publishers) and publish their papers themselves online at places like PubMed.
Scroogle
Could one convince some college libraries to buy a subcription e.g., lexus-nexus?
Take the funding for the University Library to purchase all the subscriptions, and put it towards paying for (that university's) researchers to publish. Hopefully it might discourage junk papers.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
IEEE clearly makes a big deal of archiving, pretending that it is a very challenging and expensive endevour. But I suspect that if magazines released their works to the public without restrictive copyrights (basically releasing them into public domain) after recoupering somehow their initial costs, then quickly a host of independent archievers would emerge, just like it happened with Wikipedia. These archievers would then take care of distribution, backups, data migration, offline distribution, interface innovations, etc.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
The journals are well known to run a needed service but also a racket. Certainly they do have to hire people to do the editing and verification necessary to protect their names.
Ironically I am aware of a situation in which people (researchers, companies and governments) are currently having trouble figuring out how to safely publish openly and online - nanotechnology and genomics. PLoS is cited in some papers and talks so that looks promising but the question many have is how to share intellectual property - that is, scientific research that is also important to a nation strategically - while ensuring it isn't "stolen", in other words reciprocally fair sharing.
Not to sound unfair, but the cowboy attitudes in China and possibly some bigotry lend Japanese to worry about genomic research being "stolen" by China (in quotes because they would be giving it away). They don't seem to get it, they aren't worried about publication costs at all the question is what if it all goes only one way? Money is definitely not a problem at this level.
There is a push to translate and put online many Japanese research papers so that more people around the world can find them and initiate collaborations. Also money is not the problem at least in the initial stage. I have no idea if they have a system in course to maintain quality which is what the peer journals say they are selling.
So here is how I see it. Certainly if all grants contained publication fees that would be a nice gravy train for the journals, though slanted against developing countries and students perhaps. However at a certain level, not only does everyone gain by open publication, also the country that publishes more wins more. The IEEE provides global level services that are strategically valuable to countries and they should pay.
Another alternative is to ask Japan to pay. Money isn't a problem. Just sign an agreement that limits publication in English to starting one month after a Japanese translation is published, and allow the Japanese version to be limited to certain organizations if Japan so wishes. It would work. Of course Korea might go for that too.. Well this is only partly tongue in cheek, it would work, though there would be an outcry I expect.
Anyway, it is eminently feasible to publish like arxiv the problem is how to pay for quality controls and reviews. Of course nobody would accept a one-sided transaction. I am thinking this might be an interesting issue to raise at the next STS Forum which I was involved in last year. Small companies like mine can't afford to pay for all kinds of journals, but want to see information. If small venture entrepreneurs are going to be important drivers of the future (as Japan and probably some other companies believe) they should be supported too. This means that however money works out, the end user fee should be far lower or best of course, free, and that reproduction rights should similarly be free as in freedom. I think it is time for the journals to cut their fat (and paper publications) and focus on their core service (arbiter of quality), improve that and get paid in perpetuity by governments.
Readership, publication volume, and reviews by leading universities in respective fields can suffice to grade the journals and see which should be paid most. This will open the way for a new market to be created that rewards quality, efficiency and freedom.
At least one machine learning journal, JMLR , has already moved to a free online distribution method. There is an interesting story here about how the editors of a previous journal (MLJ) quit en masse due to dissatisfaction with the publisher, and started JMLR.
Surprise, in my profession (chemistry graduate) those grants are (at least in the US), NSF, NIH, or DARPA.... all government (tax payer) funded agencies. If we write those into our grants, in essence, the tax payer is paying.
The perception of the journal business as a parasitic racket is bolstered by the phenomenon of authors having to pay per-page charges to get articles published in these very expensive publications. Reminds me of the pharmaceutical industry...
Yes, there is a need for someone, somehow, to finance the organized peer-review and publication of scientific articles. However, I flatly refuse to accept the proposition that $1500/year subscriptions and author-paid page charges are a good way to do this. Free interchange of information is essential to science; academic publishers on the present model, however, are NOT.
The IEEE, based on my reading of the article in the dead-tree newsletter, is worried that they'll be innovated out of the academic publishing business, and they cannot imagine what will supplant it. This is a frankly bizarre attitude for an organization dedicated to technical advancement.
Of course, as an IEEE member, I've seen a great deal of bizarre behavior from IEEE HQ.
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
Sitting right next to the online version of the paper could be ... dum dum dum ... an advertisement!
Even better, most people download the PDF version, print it out, read it, and stick it in their cabinet for future reference. Sticking in an ad midway through the paper would not only cause the person to read the ad (even fleetingly), but also to SAVE the ad where others might pick it up and read it.
What sort of ads would be relevant? Well, that depends on the paper, of course. Experimental papers using culturing could feature ads on media supplies, incubators, etc etc. Applied math papers could feature ads on Matlab, Mathematica, stats programs, etc etc.
Or, even better, have Google scan the paper and dynamically place ads in it based on its content.
Why didn't anyone suggest this yet? (Or did the daily rant on editorial copy staff cloud the first 100 comments??)
Favorite
Authors of articles published in IEEE Journals and Conferences already pay for the article to be published.
In IEEE Journals this comes as a flat fee per page and an extra fee. "After a manuscript is accepted for publication, the author's company or institution is asked to pay a charge of $110 per printed page to cover part of the cost of the publication." (Some Journals, depending on the Journal; is it IEEE or IEEE Computer Society make this mandatory and some make it obligatory). Reference http://www.computer.org/tc/author_new.htm
There are also extra fees for each page beyond a certain number of pages. For example, for IEEE Transactions on Computers the page limit is 10 pages for $110 per page. Every extra page beyong 10 (up to 16) is charged $200 per page (this is a mandatory fee).
Conferences are similar. When you publish at a conference you must register for the conference and guarantee you will be there to present for it to be published in the proceedings. Typically the conference registration fee helps pay for the publication of the papers. Some of these conferences charge upwards of $400-$450. (I am attending IPDPS next month and I paid $200 for a student registration; my professor is paying $505.)
So authors already pay (or their institution pays) for publication of their articles. If these fees are increased it will be harder for authors to publish. I already paid over $500 to register for and present a paper at FPL'2004 (fpl.org) out of my pocket. I will end up paying $200 for the IPDPS registration and probably another $250 for the hotel. This time my school has already paid for some other expenses.
You could even do product placement. "Here I use the the ultra mega neutron source from Glow co. You you think of radiation think Glow co."
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
A big problem is that a majority of the journals are run by for profit companies like Elsevier. They get free content (from tax-funded scientists), cheap editing (through free peer review), and sell subscriptions for huge sums (to tax-funded libraries). They have a monopoly and, worse, they are taking money from a notoriously unfrugal consumer: government entities that don't bid.
Publishing, like research, is a public good. It can and should be run by the state. Universities and national labs already have small-run publications which they give away for free. I would bet that, even for these government run institutions, it would be more cost-effective to self-publish. They could put those parts of academic publishing that cost the most (typesetting, printing, mailing) up for bid.
The only tricky point is getting scientists to publish to the new journals--prestige of the journal is quite important.
Lots of problems and problematic negotiations with this approach as well, but not impossible. Being high on such a list would be expensive, but would at the same time mean that the country is on the forefront of international research in that area. A high ranking would thus give lots of bragging points, and most governments that are interested in research would love to score high on such a list.
How do you think that currently the unemployed genius in Zimbabwe gets access to the most up to date scientific results?
Have the first person who "must read it" pay $100, the second $50, then $25, $15, $15 - about $200 net after credit card processing costs. Or whatever rate they figure out will be most likely to cover their costs.
If there's no one out there that needs the article enough to pay $100, it probably wasnt worth writing. If an author thinks what they've written is important enough, they can pay the "opening cost" to get it available for free.
Finally, IEEE should encourage companies to sponsor articles - it's a cheap way to get their name embedded into the text of an article forever, winning a little goodwill from everyone who reads the article for free.
Many professional organizations provide "all you can eat" access to a selected group of dozens or hundreds of journals for an annual fee. They also offer articles a la carte but that gets expensive fast.
CCLI does something similar for contemporary Christian music.
NetFlix and Blockbuster do the same thing on a monthly basis for DVDs, and other organizations do the same for books and other materials.
Paying a monthly rather than annual fee for journal access would be great for the occasional researcher who may need to look up dozens of articles over a few weeks time, but then not read anything for a year or more. Reasonable pricing structures, like 30 articles over 30 days for $xxx, will open research to those who could not otherwise afford it.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
... then put the article online for general public after they are 2 months old. The eager readers who pay can also read the articles online to save on printing and shipping costs, but would have a specially flagged account that would allow them to see the most recent articles before the non-payers.
They should charge tech universities for subscriptions. It's saving those grad students trips to libraries, which means the universities don't have to spend as much on their libraries. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. Those universities make fortunes from their corporate contracts. More and more of the products of those contracts are patented or otherwise proprietary. Investments in the university by the public, their students, and various professional organizations are recouped by the shareholders in the corporations with the contracts, and the shareholders in the universities. The IEEE is subsidizing those profits with free access. Why not capture some of that profit to fund their library which reinvests in those profits?
--
make install -not war
Just stick a bunch of flash based ads in the journal articles. Embed hyperlinks to products and services etc.
Annoying, but it would probably do the trick. Then, the people who pay don't have to suffer the ads.
All your attention are belong to my old internet meme.
What's that site that has the passwords and logins for all the subscription only sites?
"html sucks for equations"
Not sure what your standard is for "sucks" but MathML works reasonably well and is supported in Firefox/Mozilla, though you need some particular fonts.
Some of the MIT OpenCourseWare like, Calculus makes fairly extensive use of fairly involved formulas.
I wish it worked on Konqueror, maybe it does, but it didn't last time I tried it.
Probably would be nice if this stuff was supported in a more standard way in Linux/Firefox distributions too, without having to rummage around.
It would be great to see stuff like MathML and the MIT course ware get a lot wider exposure, especially to young people. Maybe it would counter the general bad education system, especially in the U.S.
@de_machina
as someone who has been on academic search committees, a position announcement in IEEE is a must. how about they increase the fee charged and target the announcements based on the journal subject. so, if an employer is looking for someone with a background in nanotech, the job announcement will show up with results found in IEEE Transactions on Nanotechnology or related journals.
this would avoid concerns about bias that commercial ads might have and also further the mission of a professional organization.
I'd actually consider joining ACM or IEEE at that point, because some day I want to get an article about bitgrid computing published.
--Mike--
1. Run a magazine...
2. Provide all content for free on the internet...
3. ???
4. Profit!!!!1
Charge some rediculous fee for companies that patent software (often for ideas that are 25 years old).
These funds could then be used to publish information in IEEE...encouraging the reuse and the adoption of standards, and freeing the creative juices to flow for solving NEW problems rather than reinventing pointers, !=, and do while constructs without infringing on someones patent.
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
Libraries get their money.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I used to publish in IEEE and ACM peer-reviewed journals. But between the slow turnaround and the page charges, it was more trouble then it was worth. So I started filing patents instead. Not only do I get more visibility, people pay me money. And the U.S. Government peer-reviews, publishes, and archives my stuff forever.
what's wrong with a trip to the library?
I work in a library dammit, I'm getting a masters in Library and Information sciences, and now students have to be *saved* from going to a library? Geez...
The company I work for pays thousands of dollars a year to advertise in scientific society journals (mainly Medical Physics - circulation 4,681). I think our marketing department would highly disagree with you.
This is tangential, but there you are. Papers published by U.S. government employees (there are a lot of us) as part of their official duties are in the public domain. My understanding (IANAL) is that were are, therefore, able to freely redistribute our papers. My lab provides PDFs of our papers in a public area on our website, as does the Agricultural Research Service of the Unites States Department of Agriculture.
Stupid typo. It should read "...United State[s]..."
What if the internet provider pays for the subscriptions? Now a days, if we use internet from the school we can access some articles because the schools pay for them. Internet providers could create groups according to the users interests and provide subscriptions to relevant publications. This should be a lot cheaper than individual subscription and... in certain way... the users of chats, spam and trivial stuff could end up helping to finance access to more relevant stuff for those who are interested. Because asking the persons who create the articles (i.e. hole process) to PAY to publish instead of getting paid for their work IS WRONG!!!
Use Google adsense ads to pay for the bandwidth. I have two small web sites (I am just a Java consultant) and Google ads generate enough monthly revenue to pay for servers, ISP charges, etc. with plenty to spare. I don't find the ads intrusive and it basically provides me with free web sites. I just open sourced my KBtextmaster project, so my bandwidth charges might increase, but I still think that I will break even.
Quite a lot of journals provide free access to abstracts online. If publishers were willing to sell papers in electronic format for only $1.00 I think that most of us would not grumble too loudly. However, journals that sell papers out of their archive on a one-off basis commonly charge $35.00-$40.00 per paper.
correction - the EURASIP JASP is 100 euros/page, not pounds.
The reason I mention this particular journal, is that I was considering publishing in this journal, but since I would be paying the fee out of my own pocket (not all science is funded by grants), you can bet I won't be.
The 'Author pays' model is not actually so bad. Most research is done under Government grants, and publication charges are usually build into the budget. Thus, the science funding agencies, and ultimately the govornment, supply the majority of the funds. Most journals also charge access fees, modest for individuals, exorbatent for institutions (i.e., libraries).
Fortunatly, most journals I am aware of do not *require* author payment if the author cannot afford it -- that is if they do not have grant money. Thus, the system is fair.
5 cents per document?
The potential author publishes a summary, atable of contents, and a schedule on a web site. the web site advertizes the potentil project and solicts bids. An on-line aution ensues. What is unique is that indivduals pool their bids in this auctionb with each diecding what it is worth to them. Eventually an aggregate price forms and each bidder has to pay the same or withdraw. When teh price stabilizes, the author decides if the price is worth the effort, if so the author writes the article/book/whatever and those who bid have to pur their money in escrow. If not, the bargaining continues until a price is reacehd or the parties lose interest.
Just phase out money, and all kinds of little problems like this won't matter.
what sig?
IEEE is a trade organization. While maintaining the archive would be expensive for individuals, it is rather cheap when spread across the whole organization.
Author-pays works OK for the American Astronomical Society, which offers inexpensive access to journals (e.g. Astrophysical Journal) but charges authors for submission.
And yet, the money has to come from somewhere. Any better ideas?
T-shirts.
"Where's my other sock?" - A. Einstein
Scientific journal prices are outrageous when you consider that most of the work involved is done by volunteers. The current scientific publishing process is just a scam to pump vast amounts of research money into the mostly private publishing sector. I'm talking hundreds of millions of dollars here.
This outrageous because all the relevant parts of the process (writing articles and peer reviewing them) is done exclusively by volunteers. Of course there is some cost involved in printing, formating and hosting content. However printing is irrelevant now that we have internet. Formatting makes it look nice but does not add any value to an article and hosting can easily be covered by sponsors (universities, companies, other research minded organizations) and advertising.
I heard some jaw dropping figures a few weeks back. Apparently a well run, not very high profile journal can bring in around one to two million dollars annually. There's one or two guys doing the formatting & editing, a part time editor and that's about all the costs involved in producing the journal (except for the logistics of actually printing and distributing journals). Maybe alltogether they have 300K of expenses. The rest is profit. That's a single journal. There are many journals and university libraries pay hundreds of thousands of dollars (each) annually for subscriptions to all these journals. Internet makes publishers irrelevant so take them out of the equation. They suck at hosting content online (try a few publishers and see for yourself) and the stacks of paper are not interesting except maybe for archiving.
The IEEE should act in the interest of its members and the scientific community and not continue to provide the publishers with an easy source of revenue. Using their member subscriptions (which do not include access to their online library!) they should be able to cover all the costs.
Jilles
Several journals are already implementing Open Access with different levels of success. I develop and publish a relatively successful online Open Access journal, the Journal of Medical Internet Research (apologies for the plug), and we use the author-pays model based on a $750US fee to cover (most of) the costs. Often this amount can be written into or otherwise covered by a grant supporting the research in question.
We also have additional sources of revenue, including advertising (albeit very little), and one of the most promising areas is what would traditionally be called "value-added" content. While the full-text of all articles is freely available, "extra" things like PDF versions, on-demand printed versions, etc. are on a fee/membership basis. This seems to work quite well in covering costs while not restricting access. As well, other journals such as BMJ use time-delayed access (ie. articles older than 6 months become open), which is just another way of creating "premium" content. Another interesting publisher is PLoS, who have several resources on the costs of OA publishing.
As some have said in other threads, the main cost is in the actual process of reviewing/copyediting/proofing, not the actual hosting/bandwidth. Open Source journal publication software such as OJS is lessening this barrier, as are other tools. For example, we use OpenOffice to convert articles to the NLM XML schema, automating XML/layout editing and decreasing the cost. By finding alternative, "non-traditional" sources of revenue (like tiered access/content), and using Open Source tools to simplify and automate the publishing process, bringing the overall cost of online academic publishing down to a level where Open Access is cheap is already being realized.
The whole process needs to be monitored, in case a group of authors/reviewers wander down a rabbit whole.
That poor rabbit...
Required reading for internet skeptics
We're used to thinking about stability in terms of things that we are pushing or pulling -- carts pulled from in front are dynamically stable, and carts pushed from behind are generally dynamically unstable. The problem is a false analogy between cart motion and rocket travel. When you're pulling or pushing a cart, you are referring the force to an external reference frame (the world at large): if the cart turns a little bit, you will continue to thrust in the same direction relative to your surroundings. But when a rocket under power turns a little bit, the line of thrust turns with it.
Small rockets intended for use in an atmosphere generally have fins near the back. The fins are a simple way to refer the rocket's direction to the fixed medium around it. Fins become impractical for larger rockets, or for rockets flown outside an atmosphere. For those applications you have to have another direction reference (like, say, a gyroscope) and gimballed engines or some other way of vectoring the thrust. If Goddard had flown larger rockets he would have used gyro control systems too.
You do realize that editing a journal is a full time job, right? You're proposing that, on top of running a lab, teaching courses, faculty responsibilities, and doing your own research, that you'd have time to also do the full time job of an editor?
How many hours per week are you willing to spend reviewing papers? Keep in mind that good journals reject 90% of the papers that get submitted, so multiply any reviewing you're doing now by 10X per journal. Then factor in several hours per paper that you're going to send out for peer review to be spent figuring out who to send it to, and the back and forth necessary to find people willing to review it. Don't forget that you're now also in charge of keeping those reviewers on schedule.
Every scientist I know is already overscheduled and hard pressed for time. You've just added 40-50 hours per week to those overloaded schedules. When are you going to have any time to do research?
---Yes, there is a need for someone, somehow, to finance the organized peer-review and publication of scientific articles. However, I flatly refuse to accept the proposition that $1500/year subscriptions and author-paid page charges are a good way to do this---
Keep in mind that you're dealing with economies of scale. Most scientific journals have fewer than 1000 subscribers. To put out a high quality monthly publication with so few purchasers, you're going to end up with a higher price simply because of the numbers.
Second, remember that many journals are used by scientific societies to fund other activities. Some journals are owned by research institutions, and any funds made from subscribers go to pay for research. Yes, there certainly are many journals owned by publishing conglomerates that merely rake in the money as pure profit. But eliminating our current system means eliminating most scientific societies (who sponsor things like meetings and scholarships) and hampering research at some institutions.
Surely there is some middle ground where we can keep supporting these worthwhile ventures while cutting out the rapacious profiteering of others.
---First, much of the research published is paid for by government grants via taxes, so taxpayers are paying for the "privilege" of reading about research they already paid for themselves.---
Should everything the government pays for be free? What about farming subsidies, shouldn't we expect free food? Small business loans--shouldn't products from these companies be free to all taxpayers?
Bah, making publishers pay is for politicians, and we all know how that ends up. End users should pay to play, but they need a much more flexible payment system that scales down to individual students and engineers.
... they're pretty easy to protect these days in a variety of ways (no printing! no saving!) -- most people don't have the patience to crack crypto or pirate Hot Engineering Papers.
... so I'm willing to pay a bit more for a paper copy.
...
What if I could buy a single copy of a current paper for $10? Maybe something from last year for $5? Perhaps an advanced copy of the proceedings for an upcoming event for $1000?
Maybe I want a PDF
Then again, maybe I want to festoon my office with official looking manuscripts
Maybe I'd like an account with "my.ieee.org," where I could pay a low flat rate for access to a variable collection of material for a set period of time -- like the O'Reily Safari system.
Maybe I'm teaching a course with 200 students, and there's a few important papers I want them to read and reference. Maybe I work at a high school with an engineering program.
Maybe the library's closed, I have a paper due tomorrow, and I'm scrambling to complete a paper. Would I pay $10 for an IEEE online day pass? Sure thing!
Really -- there are tons of markets they're missing on the low end. I'm sure they can maintain their high end subscription services, but there's quite a few us also wanna read these things
Why not put science in the hands of politicians? I've got one word for you: Lysenkoism.
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of
I expect all scientific publishers will eventually be forced to adapt to the inevitable change to various forms of open-access publishing, whether they like it or not, because it is being demanded by the end users (the researchers) who, afterall, provide the publishers with free raw materials and free reviewing labour. This is increasingly being seen as a likely outcome even by the large publishers according to the one journal editor I know. It may come as a shock to some publishers, but that will not change the outcome or the reviewing workload one iota.
Scroogle
sort of model.
Lets say there is a pot of funds to power the IEEE. This pot comes from any sane cost cutting measures the IEEE can take, such as cutting down the amount of paper sent, etc.. The remainder of the pot comes from the interested community. They can fund raise, donate, whatever to get the ball rolling.
The size of this pot is the annual operating costs, plus some reasonable buffer. Nothing is opened until the pot reaches this size.
During this process, IEEE lets people know what they are trying to do, provides rapid feedback, such as a simple dollar meter, and establishes a small community-wiki thing to collect ideas and discussion.
One problem is keeping active members paying. Part of that discussion needs to be about value adds for paying members with the idea being those that can pay should because the IEEE is a good thing to continue to have around and working out open access will bring new members.
Every time somebody accesses the content, that effect of that access is shown on the pot. It won't be much, but it will be something. Doing this keeps the content from actually being "free" in that there will be a guilt factor attached. Not enough of one to discourage anybody, but just enough of one to get people to really think about their ability to pay and actually doing so.
Once things are up and running, those that pay for memberships, get access to the content without much hassle and whatever value adds the community comes up with. Those riding free, get to see the size of the pot and what their access is costing. Donations are encouraged as are fund-raising efforts. Memberships could be an incentive to help people get involved with these.
Over time, the overall state of the pot is known to everyone. When it reaches critical points, access can be slowed (for non paying members), fund raising incentives can be increased, etc...
Properly done, I would think the value would be obvious to everyone involved. That's the key really. We need this organization right? If we need it and people are given plenty of options, it should work out ok.
Blogging because I can...
It seems to me that the IEEE is doing a great job of making itself totally irrelevant to the software community. The main reason for this is that people, who might otherwise be interested in what they have to say, are turned off because IEEE charges a hefty fee to access any of their content (standards or articles).
A quick example. You are about to introduce unit testing to your team. Do you know that IEEE has a standard for that? Probably not. Even if you knew it, would you pay $65 for a Xeroxed copy of it? Would it be any better if you were a IEEE member and could get it for $55? Probalby not, because you can find similar information for free on the web. It's not exactly the same because it's scattered all over the place and hasn't been peer reviewed, but it's good enough.
I think that opening up the stacks to everyone, free of charge or for a nominal fee, would be a good move for the IEEE that would make them more respected and relevant. They have accumulated a large amount of information about how software is done, but nobody pays any attention because the cost is too high. In my 10 years in the software business, I've only had ONE co-worker who was a IEEE member and I've never seen a IEEE software standard.
--- Of course, good journals reject a lot of papers, but the journal editors themselves do not review any of them--- Sorry, you're wrong. I'm an editor with a scientific journal. I read (or one of my co-editors reads) every single paper that comes across our doorstep. We have to make a decision on every single submission--does it go out to reviewers, or is it rejected unreviewed. As I asked before, if a journal is rejecting 90% of submissions unreviewed (which is a solid number for a decent journal), that means if you eliminate the editors, your workload just went up 10X per journal you review for. Do you have that kind of spare time? ---I am a research scientist and I know what the workload of reviewing papers is like; most of my colleagues spend on average at most a few hours per week on reviewing activities--- So you have 20-30 hours to spare? What about the time you'll be spending finding reviewers for papers, or chasing down late reviews? Now how about the time refereeing between authors and reviewers as to what changes are reasonable to request? Don't forget all the time you'll be spending proofreading and copyediting (nomenclature alone is gonna take you a while). Sorry you won't be getting any research done. ---I expect all scientific publishers will eventually be forced to adapt to the inevitable change to various forms of open-access publishing, whether they like it or not, because it is being demanded by the end users (the researchers) who, afterall, provide the publishers with free raw materials and free reviewing labour--- 1) I think we're more likely to see a compromise, something in between like what's happening now where journals make papers free to access after 6 months. You can't replace a successful system until you have something else that will work as well. So far, open access does not work as well. 2) In my field, it's only a tiny vocal minority who really seems to care about such things. If you asked most scientists if they'd rather have everything be free, sure, they'd like that. But they're not adamant about it, nor are they spending a lot of their time worrying about it. They've got more important things to do with their time, like their careers. It doesn't make much difference to them whether they're going to have to spend $3000 to subscribe to a journal, or spend that same $3000 to get a paper published in an open access journal. They're out $3000 either way. --- It may come as a shock to some publishers, but that will not change the outcome or the reviewing workload one iota.--- But it will drive the smaller journals out of business, and drive more power into the hands of the big conglomerates who can weather the storm.
As an editor, you'd think I'd know better.
--- Of course, good journals reject a lot of papers, but the journal editors themselves do not review any of them---
Sorry, you're wrong. I'm an editor with a scientific journal. I read (or one of my co-editors reads) every single paper that comes across our doorstep. We have to make a decision on every single submission--does it go out to reviewers, or is it rejected unreviewed. As I asked before, if a journal is rejecting 90% of submissions unreviewed (which is a solid number for a decent journal), that means if you eliminate the editors, your workload just went up 10X per journal you review for. Do you have that kind of spare time?
---I am a research scientist and I know what the workload of reviewing papers is like; most of my colleagues spend on average at most a few hours per week on reviewing activities---
So you have 20-30 hours to spare? What about the time you'll be spending finding reviewers for papers, or chasing down late reviews? Now how about the time refereeing between authors and reviewers as to what changes are reasonable to request? Don't forget all the time you'll be spending proofreading and copyediting (nomenclature alone is gonna take you a while).
Sorry you won't be getting any research done.
---I expect all scientific publishers will eventually be forced to adapt to the inevitable change to various forms of open-access publishing, whether they like it or not, because it is being demanded by the end users (the researchers) who, afterall, provide the publishers with free raw materials and free reviewing labour---
1) I think we're more likely to see a compromise, something in between like what's happening now where journals make papers free to access after 6 months. You can't replace a successful system until you have something else that will work as well. So far, open access does not work as well.
2) In my field, it's only a tiny vocal minority who really seems to care about such things. If you asked most scientists if they'd rather have everything be free, sure, they'd like that. But they're not adamant about it, nor are they spending a lot of their time worrying about it. They've got more important things to do with their time, like their careers. It doesn't make much difference to them whether they're going to have to spend $3000 to subscribe to a journal, or spend that same $3000 to get a paper published in an open access journal. They're out $3000 either way.
--- It may come as a shock to some publishers, but that will not change the outcome or the reviewing workload one iota.---
But it will drive the smaller journals out of business, and drive more power into the hands of the big conglomerates who can weather the storm.
IEEE publications are an important academic tool, universities should step up and fund the enterprise, either through institutional subscriptions, grants, or a combination of both.
And yet, the money has to come from somewhere. Any better ideas?
Support Conracts
I like music
Perhaps they could institute a delay of a month or two before the entry is opened up to non-subscribers.
This would have the additional advantage of being free "advertising", if the quality is good enough to merit that term. (I wouldn't know, I've never seen whatever it is that they're planning on offering.)
Perhaps three months would be about right. Then anyone who wanted timely access would subscribe (unless the rates were atrocious), and casual browers could get the old info (possibly laced with discrete notices to the effect that more recent information is available only to subscribers).
I don't really know how this would work in practice, but it might work quite well. When I was an impoverished student I would buy my monthly issue of Analog, even though if I waited a month I could pick it up at a used book store. (That seems to have vanished as an option...even the stores aren't carrying SF magazines anymore around here. The distributor doesn't want to handle them.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The thing that makes IEEE great is it is independent from industry, yet it works with them all the time to make standards. Donations from organizations and individuals along with subscriptions finance events, education events, publications, and services. Renewal is about $20 student, and about $80 for professional members. Other society memberships cost extra, which includes access to the published papers and databases for those societies.
... Err obscure.. Especially with how much managing the review system costs.
True having all online databases available to all members would be great, but it costs money to run. I would be willing to shell out more money for a standard membership if it opened up all the online IEEE databases. Free access to everyone for the databases could put a severe damper on the membership renewals. Yes, I would like to see the online database available to everyone, but without a membership fee, I don't see how it would be cost productive.
I see too much separation within the IEEE group in general. Many societies I wonder if they actually make enough to support their publications. Some societies most likely make more than enough. I guess my point is if IEEE needs to prioritize itself. Even if it means forcing societies to be only online publications.
As far as review costs, some documents just need the volunteer peer reviews. I am wondering if a forum system would be better then direct email. A forum system would force the information to be handled in one area. Access levels in a forum can be set. Also review levels. Also I believe a single forum would be much easier to manage than multiple, as societies within IEEE may want. Direct emails take way too much effort to manage as a whole. Even if it keeps things somewhat more secure.
Just my two cents. Active IEEE member since '96.
And the irony is that they stand to benefit the most in the long term from such increased access. As a graduate student in science, I can attest to the fact that online free student access to journal articles has UTTERLY TRANSFORMED my ability to make use of the scientific literature. I believe that this is especially true for interdisciplinary research.
Futhermore, I confidently predict that we will see a large burst of scientific productivity in the years ahead that is a direct consequence of this online free access. The difference from the way things were done in the past is simply profound. I can download, scan, absorb and reference hundreds and hundreds of journal articles in a way that simply wasn't possible before. And this comes just in the nick time to help deal with the increasing avalanche of scientific literature.
Creating free access to all scientific journal articles is probably one of the most rewarding investments our society could make.
mhack
Building a better ribosome since 1997
IEEE should declare itself non-profit. Volunteers, corporate and non-corporate members can join.
Corporate standard-warriors can submit standards, participate in gremi and discuss.
Volunteering private persons could submit standards as well.
The leading-board could be funded by voluntary donations. They could adopt an early-subscription model; the whom who pays, gets the standard a couple of weeks before it's publicly available. That's fair.
See how the IETF does it. That could be a model for the IEEE.
Standards should be FREE as in free beer, free of patents and available to anyone anyway. With no charge.
Maybe the IEEE will dissolve itself in the IETF. Maybe ITU and ETSI join them...
Just my 2c.
Alex.
You look like a million dollars. All green and wrinkled.
The system you are thinking of would of course not be a hindrance to anyone wishing to publis his research, if it was implemented. But it still seems like plan economy in at least one important respect: who decides which journals are being available for free? All "academic" journals? I think the borderlines here are very fuzzy (do, for exampe, the IEE Review, New Scientist, and THES all count?) and it is better left to those active in the field to make those decisions in a decenteralized fashion. And it would still be a bit unfair to those scientists who did nothing to deserve that their country refuse to pay the bills.
Not to mention that the system would be quite unnecessary. As the examples of JAIR and JMLR show, it is perfectly sensible to run an academic journal online-only with more or less no operating expenses at all.
As for the unemployed genius in Zimbabwe, s/he probably reads papers he gets directly from researchers' homepages. That's how I get the absolute majority of the papers I read. I am of the opinion that a researcher that doesn't make his writings available on his webpage doesn't care very much about being referenced.
Grow veggies and pass on the crap being passed off as essential. Knowledge does best when freely available. The societal damage caused by knowledge restriction will always outweigh the benefit of increased monaay. Trick, perhaps, is to cut non-essential corners (ie web publishing only) and take a distributed approach to the effort (distributed community administration). Thinner and wider and cheaper and better.
Print is important for one main reason--advertising revenue. Right now, there's much more money to be made in selling print ads to advertisors. Sure, the online ads are slowly gaining in value and respect, but they're not anywhere near the level one charges for a print ad. There's also the issue that since most science papers are read online (or printed out) from a pdf, most readers aren't seeing many ads, particularly if they're going straight to the pdf from pubmed. The solution would be including ads directly in the pdf, on the paper itself, which is controversial to say the least.