Tipping Point For Open Access CS Research? 116
First time accepted submitter trombonehero writes "Prominent Computer Science researchers from Google, Microsoft and UC Berkeley are starting to sign the 'Research Without Walls' pledge, promising to never be involved in peer review for a venue that does not make publications available to the public for free. Others have made similar pledges in isolation; could this be the start of something big?"
Re:This *is* big (Score:5, Informative)
You do realize, I hope, that many, if not most, for-profit journals also have publication fees? That includes a good number of very high-profile journals, and the fees are generally as high or higher than open access journals. Journal of Neuroscience, for instance, will charge you just north of $1000 for a paper - $950 in publication fee and $120 just to submit the paper.
Open Access journals are in general no more expensive to publish in that for-profit journals, and they have more generous exceptions for people that find it difficult to pay.
Re:There are two aspect of the problem (Score:5, Informative)
The pledge is not about not submitting to these venues. It's about not reviewing for them.
Re:There are two aspect of the problem (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, the ACM recently [r6.ca] refused to publish an author because he posted it on ArXiv.
This was a copyright assignment issue, but it directly impacts the strategy you suggest. As an academic myself, the copyright assignment issue is as big an issue as open access. For example, ACM does not allow me to let others use any figures I publish with the ACM. Sorry, Wikipedia, I may have the perfect figure to illustrate one of your articles, but the ACM won't let me give it to you.
I'm not even allowed to use my own figures for my own uses unless I put an ACM copyright notice on every copy of the figure and every slide with such a figure. This is not consistent with academic practice and custom (almost all presentations at ACM conferences violate this rule).
Re:This *is* big (Score:4, Informative)
They all do. The "prestigious" ones especially and yes IEEE does too.
From the IEEE submission guidelines [ieee.org]:
Voluntary Page Charges and Reprints: After a manuscript has been accepted for publication, the author's company or institution will be asked to pay a voluntary charge to cover part of the cost of publication. IEEE page charges are not obligatory, and payment is not a prerequisite for publication. The author will receive 100 free reprints if the charge is honored. Detailed instructions on page charges and on ordering reprints will accompany the proof.
Emphasis mine.