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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.
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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.
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.
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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"
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'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....
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
(note, I'm talking about scientific journals, like the IEEE ones)
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.
The writing is actually done by authors -- who get no monetary compensation.
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.
Most authors submit LaTeX, which is what the journals use I believe.
Reviewers do cost. Finding them, vetting them, coordinating them.
No they don't. I've so far reviewed dozens of paper and still haven't received anything. Not that I'm expecting a compensation, just saying the reviewers aren't being paid (they couldn't afford to pay them anyway).
Illustrations are worth a thousand words, but a consistently good technical illustrator is a rare bird to be treasured.
Except they don't make the illustrations, the authors provide them. Worse, you send them a nice, clean vector figure (eps) and all they do is convert it to a raster image.
Fact-checking, background-reviews, identifying possible conflicts-of-interest, that's a lot of hard-work administrivia that is expected now.
Facts are checked by the reviewers. Conflicts-of-interest are generally not handled, or if they are, it's often post-publication.
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.
That's about the only real cost here, but it can't explain the exorbitant fees for journals.
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?
Maybe the reason people share access is because it's so damn expensive in the first place. My current employer has a subscription to IEEE (and other) journals. If it weren't for that, I'd have to (theoretically) pay 30$ every time there's a journal paper I'd like to look at, not even knowing whether it's useful! It's just ridiculous.
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.
In fine if they charge for paper copies. The libraries that want those can pay for that. I just want electronic access, which costs nearly nothing.
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.
The most valuable parts of the process (authoring and reviewing) are already done for free. I don't think the associate editors get paid either, so I strongly believe an open process is now possible with just a bit of funding (same kind of funding as many open-source projects get).
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
technological terrorist brother?
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