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."

A Step Forward

[BWJones]

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 [plos.org] and Molecular Vision [molvis.org] 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.

Everything always looks easier from the outside

[maggard]

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.

The problem of prestige

[starseeker]

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.

Re:A Step Forward

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to work for SAE a few years ago. Though I can't comment in any official capacity, I'd like to clear a couple of things up:

The comments here that suggest that SAE gets all this work for nothing are uninformed. It is true that researchers donate their time to standard creation, but SAE spends a great of money sponsoring the publication of technical articles, including but not limited to:

* Document standardization and editing - SAE employs many professional editors that turn papers into defined standards. If you'd ever seen the amount of time spent on a DTD for the standard, you'd understand the investment here.

* Conferences - SAE hosts and sponsors conferences and meetings with technical standard creators. The costs of bringing researchers together are not tiny, to say the least.

* Delivery systems - The IT systems and staff that deliver these standards in electronic format sure aren't free. The dead-tree formats were also associated with enormous production costs.

* Education - SAE sponsors quite a lot of educational programs for K-12 up into college, Formula SAE, Baja SAE, Aero Design SAE, Clean Snowmobile Challenge, or Supermileage. They also provide scholarships and loans to students. This is not cheap at all.

Regarding the DRM (this was implemented well after I left) - It was unfortunately not at all uncommon for our standards to be purchased online and then re-sold by various unsavory third parties. It was also not at all uncommon for the electronic versions of these technical documents to be downloaded and then placed on public FTP servers for download by lots of people who didn't buy them, in violation of the terms of sale.

As for indexing: SAE has a product line that involves selling this index in dead-tree format. This is the reason that SAE does not allow indexing of their technical document list. In my own personal opinion (not SAE's!), this never made any sense to me at all. Would you go to a restaurant that made you pay to look at the menu?

Anyway, probably a lot has changed since I left, but hopefully this gives everyone a bit of insight.

Re:Gravy Train derails

[daff2k]

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.

(IANAL) Fortunately, it works that way only in the US (and countries with similar "extreme" copyright laws). In many European countries you cannot give away the rights to your own creation. We also distinguish between "exploitation rights" (i.e. the right to copy or distribute and the like) and the "intellectual property", if that's the term best describing the German word "Urheberrecht". You can give licenses to others or partially extend your exploitation rights to others, but you can't _not_ be the one who keeps every right to your creation.

So any journal that you submit an article to gets the right to print it, but you always keep the right to distribute copies of your article yourself.

Now it's too bad that so many major journals are US-based (although Springer is or was German if I'm not mistaken).

Re:A Step Forward

[jmv]

There's far too much emphasis placed on fat CVs bulging with papers that no one will ever read.

Actually, there's an increasing emphasis on the number of citations you get on your publications. Making the paper freely available online has been shown (by someone from Google, but can't find the reference) to increase citation rates dramatically.

And seriously, on some academic's web pages the first thing you'll read is about some Prof's 200 or so publications.

These are generally papers written by students. If the prof's been around for a while, it makes sense that he's co-authored hundreds of papers with his students.

Reduce the emphasis on quantity then reviewers will be happier and journals will be less prone to screw around.

Not sure what that would change for journals. What I think would be interesting to emphasise is short (letter-type) papers where researchers can make public minor, but useful results, without the overhead of normal publishing.

Re:Researchers need to organize

[radarsat1]

This is already happening and has been for some time. At least in my field (music technology), almost all the papers I have read since beginning my master's were published in conferences, which are pretty much academic get-togethers where professors are responsible for organizing the event and having the proceedings published. Whats more is the conferences tend to move around, so every year a different organizer is responsible for the whole thing, so the work load is completely shared by everyone in the organizing committee. Honestly, there is the odd book or journal article here and there, but by far the largest portion of research papers I have read and cited thus far are conference papers.

When my university organized a conference last year, students were asked to help with printing posters and doing Latex work to publish the proceedings. We didn't get a print copy, those went to the people who paid the registration fee, but all students got the papers on a CD, and they also all immediately went public on the web after each presentation.

So I'd say community-driven publication in the academic world is already here.

Re:A Step Forward

[pq]

All of the editors for several Elsevier journals with which I'm familiar deal with the journal entirely through their web site. All of the papers are submitted as PDF files. All of the reviewers get their papers as PDF files. All of my contact with reviewers and those that submit papers is done through an interface on the Elsevier web page that has to be freeware, it's so awful.

I've been an editor for an Elsevier journal, and I second everything the parent says, except for the web interface being freeware. That web interface - oh my God - is so bad that no self-respecting developer could have released it as freeware. It has got to be a consultant or in-house hack job. It is simply absurdly bad.

Strangely, the non-profit University of Chicago journals I've refereed for don't seem to have this problem, only the for-profit Elsevier ones. Make of that what you will.

Re:Researchers need to organize

[themadhamster]

And we do. For example, all the editors of the very prestigious but very expensive math journal Topology recently resigned. The same editors then started a new journal, Journal of Topology, with much lower prices. The researchers already do all the work anyway, so this is a much better arrangement.