Slashdot Mirror
Editorial In ACM On Open Access Publishing In Computer Science
call -151 writes "An editorial appearing in the ACM notices complains about the effects of the Elsevier boycott particularly with respect to academics refusing to do unpaid review for for-profit journals, particularly the extortionate Elsevier journals. Mathematician Tim Gowers's post gave energy to this about a year ago and recently he reflected on progress in several directions, including developing new arXIv overlay journals. Not disclosed in the ACM editorial is that the author serves on three Elsevier editorial boards; I take it that his complaining about the difficulty of finding referees is an indication that the boycott is having some good effect. Open access issues in academic publishing have been discussed on Slashdot before and it's a good sign that the broader issue has been getting good exposure, including a reasonable White House directive in response to a strong petition effort."
Good. It's about time these vultures realised that without the content creators (AKA scientists) they would not have a job.
Now if we can see about getting scientific data released on a default open access basis then that would be a good next step.
Two cheers for Gowers' and his band of academics. Make the buggers pay.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Since last year or so, I've declined to review for any journal that isn't open access. I don't review less than before; like many academics I get more requests for this kind of thing than I have time to accept. I simply make a point of accepting review assignments only from open access journals, and I write that as my reason for declining reviews.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Articles written in gray type on a white background.
Let them die.
For-profit journals need to die, and we need to support cheap/free open-access journals so that publically-funded academic research stops being locked up by money-grubbing middlemen.
Elsevier should be boycotted until it withers and dies. The world will be a better place.
Sounds like things are slowly creeping back to the way they were in the good old days before print journals existed and scientific papers were freely distributed among colleagues. Only now your colleagues can be the entire world.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
There may be significant room for improvement in the current academic/scientific publishing system.
Currently the review process is hidden/controlled by the publishers.
This is good in that they can line up reviews.
It's bad in that it's a closed system serving the publisher's profit needs.
The motive for the publisher to do good work is indirect in that in good publications may have a wider subscriber base.
(Interesting articles may trump good science in this regard?)
With the web, it should be possible to create a site where anybody can publish anything.
The site would need to be able to accept reviews and updates to what is published.
This might also allow the review process to stretch over time allowing initially oddball articles to gain traction over time.
Readers could choose to read anything, or limit their choices to acceptably review articles.
There would need to be some method to rate both reviewers and paper writers.
Good reviewers should get recognition just like good paper writers do now in academia.
This might provide a replacement incentive to reviewers that the current publishers are able to do.
When someone pointed out that the Op/Ed author is on the Board, the author missed the point, and said, "Yeah, I could resign, but why?".
He missed the point that "HEY!! I'M ON THE BOARD. MY OPINION MAY BE BIASED!!!"
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
For those not familiar with the arXiv, it is a preprint server service that is free (expenses footed by multiple institutions around the world, notably Cornell University in the USA.) Researchers upload their preprints generally about the time that they submit the article for consideration for publication at a typical (eg. primarily dead-tree) journal. The article will be considered, accepted, rejected, modified etc. by the journal, which has generally asked other academics to review it (for free, motivated by a sense of community, typically) and then sometimes the author makes changes and gives the final version to the journal. They may or may not update the arXiv posting to reflect the changes (typos, revisions, serious issues) that have been made in response to the reviewing process. In any case, most of the people actually interested in the result will have long seen the arXiv posting long before the journal publication happens, so the journal is principally playing the role of a validator about importance, significance, originality, correctness, etc. rather than dissemination, for those who submit their work to the arXiv.
Different disciplines have different levels of participation in the arXiv; high-energy physics and many areas of math generally have broad participation, whereas computer science, statistics, and other areas in math have lower overall levels and different publishing culture.
What the Epijournals are a project to have the validation process be similar, but not to bother with the actually having a (primarily dead-tree) journal. Rather, they will be overlays to the arXiv so the hosting and logistical expenses are all already sorted out. There are multiple free electronic journals, but the costs associated with archiving, etc. are generally either borne from "page charges" to authors, various institutional support options, or private generosity. See for example the Electronic Journal of Combinatorics a long-standing top journal in combinatorics. With the hosting on the arXiv, this should remove one of the barriers to entry for new journals.
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.
I did find that other prominent people are resigning from Elsevier boards; here's a senior researcher in malaria resigned from an editorial board on the life-sciences side. His motivation was particularly strong- he is working in malaria research, and the idea that people who could benefit from the research may well be not able to pay for the paywall is abhorrent. But I think the same rationale applies to all of science- why keep research from people who cannot pay for it?
In other Elsevier news, I found some more journal shenanigans described here which include both rigging the reviews to be sock-puppet reviews and getting into their editorial board systems, resulting in yet more retractions.
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.
First, the man complaining about politicising the issue has a clear conflict of interest, and his editorial is on a site that requires registration with review to even post an anonymous comment.
The revelation that there are people *outside* normal academia that desperately want access to valuable, and high quality materials, if for no other reason than self-education, and that those people have opinions that are worthy of being heard appears to be a completely alien concept to him, and his publisher.
Throw into that, that he fails to understand why elsevier specifically gets so much bad press that there is a boycott focusing on them specifically further paints a bullseye on just how deeply his head is stuck in the echo chamber. (Nevermind that the issue has been politicised by same said publisher first and foremost already, by pushing for legislation to blockade grant money to academics using open access journals, which is what started the whole shitstorm to begin with, as was pointed out to him in the "registered users only" comments section of his blog post. )
Add in the naivete' about his intrinsic biases, and the whole post becomes overwhelmingly amusing to an outsider like myself.
So if the journal dies, does it take all of his archives with it?
I've gone on record on a lot of forums in support of open access (hell, I even managed to throw an AGU election last year after I read the society's response to last year's call for comments that led to the OMB memo that got released last week as it pissed me off so much).
But the problem is that some of the publishers have built themselves a pyramid scheme ... they've siphoned too much money out of the system (Elsevier has been paying ~$1.40 in dividends these last few years ... about ~3.5% of their value), and they rely on people shelling out $30+ to read some 20 year old article to pay for their continuing operations, rather than stashing their page fees away as an endowment to pay for preservation of the documents.
So, when the companies do go backrupt ... will the papers fall into the public domain? Maybe, if it was a society journal, and they had a contract that didn't completely take advantage of them. More likely, however, is that it'll go up for auction ... and some other big publisher who still has money will take it over, and try to find some other way to 'extract value' from their 'new investment'.
Elsevier should be boycotted (I'm doing it myself), but so they listen and open the stuff up *before* they die.
Look, if they *really* add value by peer reviewing, charge for the peer reviewing -- make people pay to submit in the first place (rather than authors fees, downloading fees, etc.) But if they did that, they couldn't claim how 'exclusive' they are with the ratio of papers they reject.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Very Good Indeed.
I'm a member and yet they're totally untransparent about how the digital library works and what limits exist for downloading from it.
I've been trying to download several sets of conference proceedings—a couple thousand articles (two conferences, less than 10 years each)—to do some analysis on them for a research project.
Trying to play the good guy, I asked how they'd prefer me to do this and/or whether they could supply a better means for obtaining these.
"Manually" was the only answer I got.
So I did. Click, click, click in my browser. Incredibly labor intensive.
Before I was even 10 percent done, an hour in, I got blocked and a warning email.
Asked again.
"Manually" was the answer that came back again.
I said I was doing it manually; asked what daily limits (files, bandwidth, whatever) they'd prefer I stay under.
"Manually" was the terse and non-sequitur answer.
Basically, this is emblematic. I am a paying member. I have legitimate access under terms of service. I'm a researcher. I have a narrow and well-defined need and purpose for downloading a narrow and well-defined set of articles. And I'm already doing it fscking manually.
I am unable to find out how to get them without running afoul of some hidden threshold, and unable to find out what this threshold is so as to stay under it. It won't make me stop trying to assemble the conference proceedings I need, but it may cause me to stop paying for ACM membership next year.
As an academic, I also have access to many of the same repositories as do others. But the Aaron Swartz case and my own experience with the ACM (who I've previously been fond of) tells me that the current academic publishing model is inherently antagonistic toward openness. It is not just about practical constraints to encourage production and discourage abuse; it is about ensuring that knowledge is a black box only available to the anointed, with rules and properties only available to the anointed. It is about restricting access for reasons other than mundane, practical ones, and about ensuring that even the nature of the restrictions is hidden so that ideological "threats" to the system can be dealt with arbitrarily, which wouldn't be possible with open rules.
It's time to publish on open systems and let peer review happen in the open as well. And I say this as someone that is published in journals and that sat as managing editor for a Springer journal for some time.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
The sure sign of someone who knows they're doing a bad thing when they downmod
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The only open-access journal that gets up to the minimum quality border is certain publications from Wiley. Most open-access publications in computer science are plagarism, non-sense, poor quality graphs and graphics, poor grammar and poor spelling mashed together into an 8-22 page PDF. I don't even bother reading their CFPs or papers anymore, the level is just too abysmal. There might be one or two good papers among all this trash, but it simply isn't worth trying to find it.
The IEEE and ACM have started to offer optional additional author fees in return for open-access publication of the article. Making it optional brings problems though - publication is already expensive; paying thousands extra to make a publication open-access is not responsible budget management, and I'm not personally willing to give up one or even two months of salary for it.
Maintaining scarcity is a direct way to control the supply-side of the price v. supply curve. This is reason enough for companies like Elsevier to maintain a paywall. But there are other ways -- academic reputation has value as well, so it can be leveraged to help maintain the scarcity. It is conceivable that companies like Elsevier will begin to demand NDAs from submitters. Submitters will be faced with the choice of accepting the NDA in order to be published in a mainstream journal, or rejecting it and having to rely on non-mainstream journals as a vehicle for their academic credentials, which might put their academic careers at risk. NB: I'm not endorsing this tactic by saying it is conceivable, I'm only pointing it out as one way that Elsevier and their ilk could protect their business model.
In my field (cryptography) and, as far I know, CS in general there is no problem with open-access. All the major conferences and journals allow you to put copies of your articles on your own personal page (or something like eprint.iacr.org) and literally 100% of people opt to do this. I have never wanted to read an article and not been able to find it on one of the authors sites or on a preprint server. Google Scholar will even do all the work for you and find copies of articles wherever they are posted if you are too lazy to look yourself. That way we get the benefits of the traditional conference/journal organization but none of the drawbacks.
Good that those highly reputed bodies allow you to republish your PDFs printed with them. However, for the person interested in reading your paper (for which the citation says "CACM 03/13"), the natural step to look for it will be to approach CACM's site. If it is closed, many people will just curse and go on looking for alternative sources of information. Googling your document by title/author is not guaranteed to lead to http://obscure.dept.univ.edu/~author/papers/comp/2013/foobar_ftw.pdf — And, of course, there are also a large number of academics who will not publish their papers on their own site.
So, yes, IEEE and ACM are MUCH better when compared with Elsevier, and contribute much better to the advance of knowledge. But having the information published at its official point, properly cataloged, is much better.
Of course, I will also review my friends' articles. And will probably approve them. Specially if they are my friends, and know I am the reviewer.
Part of the importance on being the editorial body who mediates in this is to make the process less subjective.