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MIT Drops DRM-Laden Journal Subscription
Gibbs-Duhem writes with news that MIT has dropped its subscription to the Society of Automotive Engineers' web-based database of technical papers over the issue of DRM. The SAE refuses to allow any online access except through an Adobe DRM plugin that limits use and does not run on Linux or Unix. Also, the SAE refuses to let its papers even be indexed on any site but their own. SAE's use of DRM is peculiar to say the least, as they get their content for free from the researchers who actually do the work. And those researchers have choices as to where they send their work, and some of the MIT faculty are pretty vocal about it. From the MIT Library News: "'It's a step backwards,' says Professor Wai Cheng, SAE fellow and Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT, who feels strongly enough about the implications of DRM that he has asked to be added to the agenda of the upcoming SAE Publication Board meeting in April, when he will address this topic."
The issues of academic journals is becoming hugely problematic. Many institutions cannot afford subscriptions and the journals claim they have to charge such rates in order to stay in business. I would suggest that the enormous proliferation of specialized journals indicates that they in actuality are quite profitable. For those that do not know, there are also costs associated with publication in those same journals including costs for publishing images that can be stunningly high. One has to wonder just what the problem is with such high costs when organizations like PLOS and Molecular Vision have so much lower costs of entry, publication and distribution.
Note: I don't necessarily have a problem with profitability and am perfectly happy with a capitalistic approach to academic journals. However, what I *do* have a problem with is outrageous usage policies including DRM that is more problematic and slows progress, unfairly leveraged (illegal) monopolies, preventing fair usage and profiting from publicly funded science and engineering without fairly compensating the paying public or providing access to resources that have been paid in full for.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
*hides*
The thing to do about this is to get the big names in the field to agree to transfer their efforts collectively as a body to a free journal. The ones with established careers don't have to worry about vanishing into the mists if they don't publish in a big name, and if they move their efforts as one they can shift the momentum without having to fight it out between old journal and new.
The tools are available to do this - LaTeX is free and already in use in many cases, and there are a multitude of collaborative tools that could be used or adapted to handle article submissions and reviews. ToC at http://theoryofcomputing.org/ has some very useful LaTeX tools defined for online journal publication. All that is really needed is a) the will to do it and b) the organization and support from the major players/schools to do it.
Authors and reviewers already do most of the work for free or worse, all that is needed now is to do that work for someone other than the folks charging high fees to control the work. (There's probably a joke in there somewhere about replacing the publishers of journals with a very small shell script...)
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
OMG! MIT drops SAE DB of TP over DRM. FWIW, IANAL, but DRM PDF's are not A-OK at EDU's.
Academics just want to publish. They want their papers to be spread far and wide and critiqued and expanded on. That's what they're for. The academic journals traditionally served this purpose.
But we don't need them any more. Almost all of the information can be rendered in HTML, will be freely hosted by universities, gets indexed by google, and spread via all sorts of communication forums. Why do we need the journals? We don't. They've simply become parasites.
Dont they know its practically impossible to protect something like a academic paper. This kind of DRM is easily defeated, probably with just the print screen button, whats the point?
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
Have you seen the prices for common standards like CAN-BUS (Car Area Network) and OBD (On-Board Diagnostics)? It's usually over $1,000 for a SINGLE copy of the standard, and last I looked, you couldn't get electronic copies, only paper.
I can understand $30 or so to cover printing, storage, etc. but that amount is just robbery.
Places like MIT are the reason why I as a European haven't quite given up totally on the USA, tarnished though it is.
Another day another laod of slashdot drivel whining about DRM. jesus, give it a break guys. Your just pissed at DRM because it means you have to stop leeching.
Academics publish on their own websites. Journals provide an index of articles on a related topic. Journals sell either subscriptions or ads, and can collect earth moneys in proportion to the service that they actually provide, which is an *index* not a *content creator*.
Did you know that when an academic writes a paper, to get it published, they have to surrender the copyright to the academic journal? After that, they can't even give copies away. If someone wants to see it, they're supposed to point them to the journal publisher where they can "buy" reprints.
t ml
e er.review.html
Who are these academic publishers? Springer, Wiley, etc. Try doing a scholarly search in Google. You'll find many PDF entries show a few words from the article, but no [cache]. When you click, you seen none of the article, but are taken to a "Pay Up!" page run by Springer, Wiley, etc. I wish Google wouldn't even waste my time listing these. (Note they even make an exception, allowing them to show one version of the web page to Google and another to the public. BMW was blacklisted by Google for doing this. Why are these publishers allowed to get away with it?)
In the pre-Internet days they could get away with it. But with the Internet, these companies should have dropped out of the business. Certainly Universities are sick of paying big bucks and would love to spend their money on more important things. Many third world countries can't afford them period:
http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/121004ohanluain/
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6289896.h
Springer, Wiley etc should have gone out of business, but they've managed to hang on. How? In part due to Academics who still contribute to them. Prestige and promotion depends on having their papers published in 'prominent' journals. There are alternatives: peer-reviewed journals, organisational or web sites. What really stinks is most of this research is paid for by the tax payer. But the taxpayer has to pay Springer, Wiley, etc to read the research they paid for.
http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/2900/01/harnad96.p
http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/04-01/varian.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_journal
Hopefully Universities will finally read academics the riot act: "We're not going to buy anymore of your publishing buddies overpriced ripoff journals, and we're not going to give you credit for being published in one either" and for government/taxpayers to say "We paid you to do the research. We're not going to let you give away the results"
is that there are substantial costs for what passes for quality. You have reviewers, you have professionals looking at submissions and you have indexing.
Sure, all of this can be replicated for free on the web. It is just that you throw out the "professional review" and the "professional indexing" and instead have "groupthink" and "concensus".
Why do they want to limit access? To prevent redistribution without attribution and without their control. They may not own the rights to the original research, but they own the rights to their compliation of it. Like a phone book, the names are not what the publisher owns - they own the compilation and the index.
The current "answer" on the Internet is the Wiki-this and Wiki-that which for some things get more people involved and opens the field to anonymous contributions. It also reinforces groupthink and concensus-building so everyone that doesn't agree gets shouted down (or more accurately in the wiki case, out-edited). The end result is you have an open forum where you used to have professionals.
With the current thinking on copyright (bah!) and such, can you blame a professional journal trying to protect their existance? If their material is freely distributed, why would anyone pay for it? Worse, having some freely distributed but not everything puts a clear bias in peoples' minds.
MIT Bins DRM-Laden Journal Subscription
Those not in academia may wonder why scholarly publishing hasn't moved more quickly to on-line alternatives. A major problem is that in order to receive tenure, an academic generally has to publish in "top journals". Top journals are determined by custom and by the history of citations, and being able to publish in them does say something good about the author. So existing high quality journals with an established reputation have monopoly power and they are exploiting it.
This will undoubtedly change. The whole process has the air of a scam: editors and reviewers effectively donate their time (fees are typically nominal, if they even exist), and the authors surrender publication rights for free. Meanwhile, as someone else pointed out, the big publishers are starting new journals as fast as they can.
Congrats to MIT.
I've had several friends in academic journal publishing, and so have heard a bit of this from their side:
Editing is hard work. Maintaining a consistently high quality of writing, articles that are appropriately in-depth but accessible to the readership, sniffing out the studies that define or redefine the field.
Copy editing is brutal. Technical terms abound, the language mustn't be turgid but a certain level of gravitas is often excpected, understanding those nuances is a specialized skill.
Typsesetting can be a misery when working with formulas & like content that has gone through several cycles of review & fine-tuning. Journals shouldn't read like ransom notes.
Reviewers do cost. Finding them, vetting them, coordinating them.
Illustrations are worth a thousand words, but a consistently good technical illustrator is a rare bird to be treasured.
Fact-checking, background-reviews, identifying possible conflicts-of-interest, that's a lot of hard-work administrivia that is expected now.
Then there are the basic internal administrative costs of keeping the lights on, payroll met, licensing the typefaces, getting the parking lot snowplowed, the PCs virus-free, handling the morass of profit/non-profit taxes & exemptions, all are yet more staff.
Subscriber services is everyone's horror. What do you do when a professor or researcher passes out their personal subscription password to everyone, and suddenly you've got 60 sites around the world using that password? Or when Harvard wants a campus-wide subscription, but has several dozen domains folks will be coming in from, not to mention home users?
And printing on dead-trees is an expensive proposition, but still the media-of-record. In-house the press is easily a million dollars, not to mention paper, ink, staff, space, insurance, maintenance, distribution, capitol depreciation, etc. Reprints can earn top dollar but those require quality printing and must be accounted for.
Blithely thinking this can all be replaced with a few emails and a database is probably woefully optimistic. Doubtless there is room for journals produced thus, but ones with an active editorial process and rather richer content are probably around for while too; their ecological niche is still a valuable one to their communities.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
I'm posting this anon as I really don't want my name getting back to anyone in a position of authority at the IEEE (I know some of them, and... well, let's just say I'd rather stay anon), but this article pretty much sums up the sheer profiteering that goes on in academia today. My particular target is the IEEE, who - if you look at their most recent accounts - have net assets of something like $300 million, charge a fortune for membership (the lowest levels of which get almost nothing for their money, really), force you to transfer your copyright over to them when submitting to a journal or conference they sponsor or run, etc.
Richard Stallman urges a boycott of them. The article he links to from his website is: http://cr.yp.to/writing/ieee.html
Read it - it's important! We ran a conference sponsored by the IEEE in the last 24 months, and we had to pay 14% of our gross expenses to them as an 'administration fee', despite them doing absolutely nothing to help us whatsoever other than to allow us to use their logo (if you want your conference to be a success and regarded highly, you need their name attached really, which is sad as it gives them so much control). If we'd lost money, they would've - at most - given us 10% of our expenses back to help us. Whatever happens, they profit, despite their tremendous net assets.
I'd love to see what sort of salaries the upper echelons of the IEEE staff are making.... all thanks to the academics who are pretty much forced to use them....
I set up a wiki a few seconds ago, for the sole purpose of providing a place for the automotive engineering community to post its research online in a free and open manner.
I've done my part by creating an open forum and setting the default admin password (GMail me at my slashdot username for this). Now all that needs to happen is some automotive engineers need to start posting their papers in their new wiki.
Prestige is necessary for a journal to be a major player in a field, and such a reputation is built up over time. They sustain that reputation and academics (particularly new ones) must try to get published in those journals in order to succeed. This creates a feedback loop, as the youngest members of the community who might be the most willing to further a change to a free journal are also the most limited in their ability to buck the establishment.
I would suggest universities and departments "grade" journals and openly state which will be regarded as acceptable publication targets. In this fashion, a review board could be created for a new journal that would have the confidence of departments and could be endorsed as a "safe" publishing target from the get-go. (It would also be a difficult target, just like the established journals, in order to evaluate students according to a standard.) With this official endorsement by "big names" in the field, some momentum could begin to shift. Younger students who are new to the system and not yet accustomed to the high prices would be more willing to try and correct what many see as a serious problem. Those trying for tenure would have less to worry about when being reviewed if their institution endorses the new publication.
Prestige is a dangerous thing to worship, and the real reason for prestige of a journal is the content within it. I think a shakeup is way overdue.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
Enjoy your socialism, outrageous taxation, and your innovative "bread line" approach to health care (when available).
Just to get this out of the way, no, a wiki is not a solution to replacing scholarly peer reviewed journals. OK?
Three Squirrels
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
DRM gurus don't work cheap! They have an investment to protect too: their student loans. After spending years in a University one discovers how much milk you can get out of an academic budget.
"Yeah, basically you don't want anybody to see this unless they pay. If you price it high, it shows the content is much more valuable, and every campus wants the most valuable resources. They're really *saving* money by not having to keep all those books lying around. Trust me, it's no problem to load up Internet Explorer 5.5, wade through three password prompts, and need to click the Next button every 500 words. Masters students have oodles of time, and they need what you've got, so they have to swallow it and beg for more."
From CompSci degree to peep-show entrepreneur in no time flat.
"Don't worry baby, it's just for research."
technological terrorist brother?
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
And most use Firefox, so I can see why they'd want to drop such a journal.
Time to wake up and smell the 21st century. DRM is not ready for prime time.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Many DRM stricken PDF (especially DRM which prevents printing)
can be dealt with
convert drmstricken.pdf tmp.ps; convert tmp.ps free.pdf
in linux. While this makes the files huge and unsearchable, an
additional OCR allows to recover most of the text. As usual,
DRM does not prevent access, but makes it a nuisance.
The first thing anyone asks when your thinking about publishing a paper or evaluating the work of a researcher outside your area is "What the impact factor of the journal?". Impact factor is a measurement of the number of citations per article in a given journal and does give some idea of how "important" or "well read" a journal is. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor
/that/ paper had would be great. That way it wouldn't matter much where you published. I'm not sure how likely this is to happen, it's all too easy just to look at impact factor and say (ahh, this guy must know what he's doing).
The problem is that once a journal has a high impact factor it's likely to sustain it, the best work will get sent there first as a high impact factor journal (like say Nature) looks good on your CV. I've been in situations where I've hated many of the journals policies (on copyright etc.) but still submitted to them because, well it's not just my name on the paper and everyone wants a higher impact factor journal.
This means there is little pressure on journals to have "nice" policies. Everyone wants to read the journal because it's where the best work goes (so you have to have a subscription) and everyone wants to publish it in (because it looks good). This results in a situation where they can charge way over costs for subscription and publication (and do things like DRM which annoy people) and people will still use them.
The solution? Well it could well be for us to stop thinking about impact factors and look at the merit of the paper itself. A standard metric based on the number of citations
FYI: Excellent content available at Open CourseWare.
I've found myself teaching high school chemistry as of January, but being a science (and computer) geek in other fields I had to do some filling in. I found a course with videos of lectures. Video at 1 frame per second - strangely workable. Clear audio. Camera pans to get all equations on the board. Instructor is good. Also amusing shorts on proper lab technique. Works well for my auditory learning style, too.
MIT has committed to having content for all its courses on Open CourseWare. Coverage is mixed, ranging from full video lectures for some courses to just PDFs of a few handouts for other courses.
Check it out for your favorite field. See what the (other) Uber Geeks are learning.
-Jon
I'm not going to comment on academics publishing elsewhere, or about the research that is done. The problem with these industry groups is that they are entrenched in the engineering world, and you won't just get to go anywhere else.
I'm an engineer at a small aerospace company, and SAE specs are everywhere. All materials are called out on engineering drawings by their AMS numbers, ie: AMS5680 welding wire, AMS4777 nickel braze filler, etc. Do you need a copy of that material spec? ~$50US a pop. And you have no choice, that's how everything is spec'ed out. Are you going to do business with Boeing, Pratt & Whitney, Rolls Royce, Teledyne? Better get used to paying for access to these specs.
My company springs for the CD subscription, so I can get all I need. Whatever they pay, which is probably too much, is just the cost of doing business. I'm sure IEEE is the same way, as is AWS, etc. etc.
As was mentioned on another post, I would like to see the salaries and operating expenses of the SAE. Are they really not for profit?
Many DRM stricken PDF (especially DRM which prevents printing)
can be dealt with
convert drmstricken.pdf tmp.ps; convert tmp.ps free.pdf
in linux. While this makes the files huge and unsearchable, an
additional OCR allows to recover most of the text. As usual,
DRM does not prevent access, but makes it a nuisance.
If you are going to openly share how to do a DMCA violation; at least post AC.
The truth shall set you free!
If you're really interested in storing and distributing information long term, you'd not use computers or electricity. Daylight and eyeballs are generally free, open-source, and pretty darn reliable in most cases...
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
I'm a double major in philosophy and psychology, and just today I submitted my first ever research grant proposal. I'll know in a month if it got approved, but if I do get it, the end result will ne a paper I'll have to deliver at both a conference and a journal. Sure, they'll be undergraduate journals, and way more accessible, but still, this makes me nervous. I'm going to have to pay to get published in academic journals, later on? I'll have to give away my rights to reprint the article, my own f@#$ing idea, that some shit-head editor who already has freakin tenure and a g#$damn mercedes has utterly no need of? We're f@#$ing academics people: we're supposed to be the smart ones. How the hell did this shit ever get to this point?
Mod Points: Helping you keep your opinion to yourself.
I doubt if this violates the DMCA.
Lord High Crapflooder The Right Honourable Vlad Craig Esther McDavenpherson III
Destroyer of Mercatur.Net
i don't see the point of why we need journals anymore since all the information can be posted on the WWW ...not only because the fact it can be easily accessed from any place with internet connection (which is everywhere right now)...it also save alot of cost ..it cost quite some money to produce a paper..and cost even alot more to process the paper once it'd turned into rubbish.
'DRN' Laden, Brother of Bin.
... but its been a long day.
Silly I know
I doubt if this violates the DMCA.
It criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or services that are used to circumvent measures that control access to copyrighted works
You mean posting "Many DRM stricken PDF (especially DRM which prevents printing)
can be dealt with is not dissemination of technology that are used to circumvent measures that control access to copyrighted works?
I wonder if discussing "how to circumvent" is a violation. I was under the understanding the very discussion of how to circumvent DRM was a violation in itself.
The truth shall set you free!
Good for MIT. If only my universities weasely IT dept. would understand this sort of thing, and tear themselves away from their Windows obsession (hell, maybe even attempt to support Unix, I'm not even trying for Linux here). Oh, and stop subscribing to those stupid 'electronic books' that need an activeX plugin and don't even let you print out the pages. \RantOff.
Why even continue with the journals? MIT could just as easily create a managed social networking site for researchers where they are invited to join.
Don't make the site open to just anyone, require the posters be invited and vetted by a review board. Don't make it a narrow subject area, open it to all research.
Set the site up with an ability for researchers to create draft papers they can invite people to review, then when they publish the papers are available to any one, not just site members.
I personally would love to have access to a site like this where I could just look for topics of interest and find good papers available, and be able to easily communicate with the authors.
Since, as has been pointed out, the researchers aren't paid anyway, they wouldn't lose anything going this route.
A MySpace for the geek-hacker (in the true sense of the word) crowd.
I wondered if any of the /. crowd can tell us about college books that are electronic. I understand that some colleges offer course text only electronically and it has an expiration date that is just beyond the end of the semester. That prevents you from selling it back to the bookstore to be sold the next semester as a used book.
Al DRM-Laden?
http://www.rense.com/general79/wdx1.htm
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/online-nature01/
It's really worth reading the whole report, but here are a couple of tidbits:
(emphasis mine)
In the fall of 2005 I took an internal combustion engines course at a small engineering school in Wisconsin. As part of a course requirement I had to write a term paper about latest advancements in engine technology. Unfortunately, my university could not afford SAE's publications and I was forced to drive to the nearest University of Wisconsin campus to use their theirs. At the time SAE was not using DRM so I was able to copy a few PDF's to a flash drive and take them home to read. I don't know what I would do now.
SAE publications (especially standards) need to be accessible to everyone. By charging their high prices it creates a barrier of entry to the market that ultimately hurts the consumer.