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."

Re:A Step Forward

[afidel]

Since the researchers are rarely paid anything (and in some cases pay to be published!) and the reviewers are rarely paid much if anything I think the only costs are in profit and production and distribution. In the age of the internet production and distribution costs have been reduced to such a degree that it literally costs fractions of a penny per page. The answer to me is obvious, more online distribution of small (and not so small) journals. Yes dead tree is nice at times, but the content indexing and searching facilities of electronic media far outweigh the deadtree advantages, at least for me.

Researchers need to organize

[starseeker]

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/ [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...)

The fact is... We don't need them any more.

[91degrees]

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.

Re:A Step Forward

[Drawkcab]

Filters are useful, but those exist cheaply on the web too. The web has some powerful tools for self organizing communities. There is plenty of room for free online only journals to develop. Different sites can build their reputation for quality standards just like different paper journals have. The peer review process can still be handled very much like it is now. Switching to free online solutions doesn't have to mean total anarchy where Google is the only tool for finding papers with no means of assessing the credible from garbage.

Re:The fact is... We don't need them any more.

[ivan256]

There is still room for trust. A well known publication with a respected community of reviewers adds something to a paper. It adds authority through the trust readers place in an established journal.

The real question is that since distribution and publication costs have gone down so much, why do we need to pay so much for access to these journals?

Re:A Step Forward

[symes]

The whole issue of academic publications needs a thoroughly good rethink. There's far too much emphasis placed on fat CVs bulging with papers that no one will ever read. And seriously, on some academic's web pages the first thing you'll read is about some Prof's 200 or so publications. I feel that this emphasis on quantity over quality, as much as anything, is creating a market for more journals and in turn pushing academic institutions to subscribe to them. Reduce the emphasis on quantity then reviewers will be happier and journals will be less prone to screw around.

Second that.

[Anonymous Coward]

Enjoy your socialism, outrageous taxation, and your innovative "bread line" approach to health care (when available).

OB Wiki response

[rueger]

Just to get this out of the way, no, a wiki is not a solution to replacing scholarly peer reviewed journals. OK?

Re:Everything always looks easier from the outside

[jmv]

(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).

Re:Everything always looks easier from the outside

[Anonymous Coward]

True, but journals do not do copy editing any more.

Really? Please tell that to the full-time copy-editor who works in the office next door to me at a moderate-sized biomedical journal. I'm sure he'd be pleased to know that some anonymous slashdotter feels that he doesn't do anything.

And as is typically the case with these things, maggard's comment is pretty much spot-on, yet he's been modded down as overrated. Meanwhile, jmv's response, which clearly shows that he's never worked in publishing, gets modded up to +5. While I understand and agree with many of the sentiments expressed here, it's clear that almost none of you have any idea what goes on once you've received that "article accepted" letter. You can all sit around and have your little group mental masturbation about "how things should be", all the while ignoring the reality of the situation.

Re:Everything always looks easier from the outside

[poliopteragriseoapte]

jmv has it exactly right.

The typical journal publication process consists of these phases. VBP = Value Added by Publishers:

• Authors write and submit paper. The paper is typically typeset in latex, with high-quality figures already present. VBP = 0.
• The editor sends copies of the paper to reviewers. Some editors receive a small compensation for this (typically to pay a slice of the time of a secretary), but often do not. VBP The reviewers review the paper. Reviewers, typically faculty or researchers, are not paid for this. VBP = 0.
• Authors are notified, and if the paper is accepted, revise it. VBP = 0.
• Another round of review may follow, to ensure the reviewer's comments have been duly taken into account. VBP = 0.
• The publishing staff adapts the paper to the journal format. All of the typesetting has been done in latex by the authors already, only the format may be changed. VBP Paper is published. For the on-line version, VBP > 0, as the publisher has to have the storage and bandwidth to archive the journal (bandwidth is the main cost). For the print version, the journal has to be shipped to many libraries, and definitely VBP > 0, as the shipping operation is complex.

So I think that libraries should pay some price if they want paper copies, but else, there is not much value added by the publishers.

Indeed, high quality open journals are starting to exist, like the ACM Transactions on Computational Logic, among others.

What I still cannot figure out is why, when I write a paper, I have to transfer copyright. That's a drastic step! Why can't I just license the content?

But things are changing. Various funding agencies are considering open availability of research results (= papers) as a prerequisite for funding, and various public universities are considering making a condition for performing funded work that the results be made available for free to all via digital libraries. And this make sense as well: as the work is funded by taxpayer's dollars, it should be available to all.

Part of the reason I resigned from IEEE is that I disagree with its access policy to journals, and standards (having to PAY to access an IEEE standard??).