Who Will Pay For Open Access? 390
babble123 writes "IEEE is thinking about providing everyone with free access to its publication database (which has saved many a grad student from a trip to the library). The problem is, where will they get the money to fund the journals if not from subscriptions? In this article, they discuss one proposed alternative, 'author-pays,' but they certainly aren't enthusiastic about it, and I don't blame them. And yet, the money has to come from somewhere. Any better ideas?"
Emergent Solution (Score:4, Interesting)
The net has a reputation for novel ways of propogating data. Maybe servers will be donated. Perhaps a company would sponsor the service. Perhaps bittorrents would work. Perhaps they would be uploaded into sourceforge. Perhaps one could rely on Google caches. Maybe power users, like universities, could mirror their database.
Seriously, put it online, see what the public does.
Re:Emergent Solution (Score:5, Informative)
Another aspect is that of journals being archival. You want those papers to be available forever basically, so relying even on Google or archive.org probably isn't such a great idea.
Re:Emergent Solution (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Emergent Solution (Score:4, Interesting)
Warning: I did not read TFA.
Re:Emergent Solution (Score:5, Interesting)
Queue-jumping (Score:2)
Tapering the cost with time would also be a good idea, IMO. That way you avoid a "muggins first" mentality, where customers wait for one another to buy the last few subscriptions.
Re:Emergent Solution (Score:5, Informative)
It seems to me that these papers are written for free, peer-reviewed for free, and could very well be hosted on the internet for free. This is really the kind of thing that universities and places like sourceforge and archive.org are designed to handle, and volunteering to help with the production of this knowledge ought to just be part of being a researcher.
Re:Emergent Solution (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Emergent Solution (Score:2)
Please, you're talking to
Re:Emergent Solution (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Emergent Solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Har. In my own experience, these "copy editors" have the approximate technical skill level of a McDonald's fry-cook trainee...I know many researchers whose manuscipts have actually had errors introduced by the copy-editing process.
In my own field (computational biology), the vast majority of the thinking work (peer review, subject-matter editing) is done gratis by professors, postdoctoral researchers and graduate students. And when we publish, we pay dearly for the privelege of submitting our manuscripts and figures on a website, waiting several months for comments (from the volunteer reviewers), and signing over our copyrights to the publisher upon acceptance. Then you get to pay dearly to read the article we've written!
Given that most journal access is electronic these days, I think the entire process is a racket, propped up by the notoriously conservative nature of peer-review and scientific reputation. If we could just agree that the mainstream publishers are useless, there'd be no need to support them. But of course, they're not useless (they're the arbiters of scientific quality, for better or worse), and therefore we pay for their "services"....
Editors (Score:3, Insightful)
- Throwing out the complete garbage, crackpottery, etc: seeing if the author exists, is at a real institution, etc.
- Finding people to peer-review the article. This is not easy; it's often difficult to find 3 or 4 good people in the right sub-field who don't actually have a connection to the work. This means the editor has to understand t
Not much need for them (Score:4, Insightful)
- there is still very important jobs that you need good top-level editors for:
These are all things which could be checked very quickly without any editor by peer reviewers.- Throwing out the complete garbage, crackpottery, etc: seeing if the author exists, is at a real institution, etc.
- - Finding people to peer-review the article. This is not easy; it's often difficult to find 3 or 4 good people in the right sub-field who don't actually have a connection to the work. This means the editor has to understand the article to begin with.
The process of finding independent peer-reviewers could itself be well handled by peer review.- - Dealing with fraud, plagurism, etc. Not easy.
Dealing with fraud, plagiarism is the easy part -- identifying it when it occurs is the hard part and editors are usually not the ones who identify fraud and plagiarism - it's peers who spot almost all such problems.Re-do, sorry for the poor formatting (Score:3, Insightful)
--- Of course, good journals reject a lot of papers, but the journal editors themselves do not review any of them---
Sorry, you're wrong. I'm an editor with a scientific journal. I read (or one of my co-editors reads) every single paper that comes across our doorstep. We have to make a decision on every single submission--does it go out to reviewers, or is it rejected unreviewed. As I asked before, if a journal is rejecting 90% of submissions unreviewed (which
The author already pays NOW... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, there is a need for someone, somehow, to finance the organized peer-review and publication of scientific articles. However, I flatly refuse to accept the proposition that $1500/year subscriptions and author-paid page charges are a good way to do this. Free interchange of information is essential to science; academic publishers on the present model, however, are NOT.
The IEEE, based on my reading of the article in the dead-tree newsletter, is worried that they'll be innovated out of the academic publishing business, and they cannot imagine what will supplant it. This is a frankly bizarre attitude for an organization dedicated to technical advancement.
Of course, as an IEEE member, I've seen a great deal of bizarre behavior from IEEE HQ.
Peers are NOT free. Money is needed anyway (Score:2, Insightful)
Apart from that: "Author pays" is a really bad method. It keeps young authors from publishing frequently (since they're on a budget).
Face it: For a peer-review process, s
Re:Peers are NOT free. Money is needed anyway (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know about esoteric fields, but in computer science, I have never heard about reviewers being paid by anybody. I am very certain that I have not received a cent for th
User pays system doesn't exactly work (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunately it's not that simple. Many would argue that the 'user pay' systems doesn't work. First, much of the research published is paid for by government grants via taxes, so taxpayers are paying for the "privilege" of reading about research they already paid for themselves. Second, the goal of disseminating research results is the progress of society, so that people can learn from each other's work. With the user pays approach, only the rich
Re:Emergent Solution (Score:2, Interesting)
It's been 5 years since the internet bubble exploded, but there are still people who believe a free for all internet is the solution to all our problems.
Re:Emergent Solution (Score:2)
Re:Emergent Solution (Score:2)
A: Government grants, Universities, volunteers & donations, places like archive.org and ibiblio.org, etc.
Re:Emergent Solution (Score:2)
That being said though, I do feel that the cost to get certain "public" material is very high. My own experience is mostly with ISO. I occassionally need some information from their standards and the only way to get it is to buy the entire s
Check out British Medical Journal (Score:2)
Re:Emergent Solution (Score:4, Insightful)
I have done this for years now (on the organisatory side, albeit more for conferences) and the editing and proofreading is quite expensive.
Problem is that many authors ignore or do not use the formats provided. They use whatever they want, whenever they want and tell you to fly to hell. Some of them refuse to give you an unencrypted PDF and then whine that the things is not searchable on a CD.
Publishing is cheap, high-quality publishing is not. Journals are expensive to produce and conferences, while funded by the attencance fees, usually make a loss in my experience. Publication costs are a large part of that.
And before everyone whines that the researchers work and review almost for free, this is not the main problem. The researchers usually like to review the papers since it is in fields that interest then and reading new papers. You do not get paid for reading that Perl book you wanted to read either, geeks do it for the pleasure of it.
The main work comes from simple things like secretaries and organisation. Despite the typical Slashdot whine that middlemen are useless and should be eliminated they still do a lot of good work, especially in keeping up standards.
And organisation can be a lot. Think about it this way: For a conference with 500 submissions (not particulary large) each paper has, say, 5 reviewers. That's 2500 messages to keep track of and organize right there. And then to sort out the replies. And whining at people to get their work done. Deciding who gets to review what. Informing them. Getting their answers back and getting it to the lead reviewers. And so on. and so on. Lots of this can be done electronically, but lots of it also involves calling people and personal discussions.
Summing up draft paper submission, reviews and revisions and you easily hit 5000 emails for one conference. Someone has to keep track of it or at least keep a eye on things.
Its a lot of expensive effort, trust me.
Re:Emergent Solution (Score:3, Interesting)
That's interesting, because as far as I experienced it (from the author side), especially at conferences obeying to the formatting rules is a requirement to get the paper printed. Besides, using the Journal/Conference provided TeX-template is usually all it needs to get the formatting right - so it's not really a burden for the author. I guess with MS Word tem
Re:Emergent Solution (Score:2)
The biggest problem is not about hosting data, servers, bandwidth. It's the cost of producing them. From TFA:
"Producing a journal--sending manuscripts out for peer review, editing them, formatting text and artwork, and proofreading them--costs time and money."
Author-pays isn't a good option because it has impact on journal quality. And information is already free (if you are in a university and know people who to some research)
[joke] just teach those researchers how to use a blog, and use trackback for
Re:Emergent Solution (Score:3, Interesting)
Government ? (Score:5, Interesting)
I mean, why not just put it under a military budget or academia ?
Re:Government ? (Score:2)
(ahem colossal military budget)
This always bugs me when I see it. In 2001, US military spending was at an all time low of 3.0% of the GDP. Even with the "huge" increases since 9-11, we are up to a whopping 3.7% of GDP (reference [truthandpolitics.org]). If you really want find extra money in the budget, convince the politicians to quit funding their pork projects. (Note: fat chance on that.)
Re:Government ? (Score:2)
Yes, 48% of discretionary spending is a [i]colossal military budget[/i]. I don't question that our GDP can support it, but let's not pretend it's not frickin' huge, nor that it doesn't indicate where our governments priorities lay.
Pug
Re:Government ? (Score:4, Informative)
Your "reference" page lists the military budget as 49% of the discretionary spending in 2003 (the last year listed). I suspect that that number doesn't even *count* the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which are left out of many budget reports (hey look, we've decreased the budget deficit. All we had to do was not count all the money we spend, wee!).
The US spends more money on the military than every other nation combined (the site you linked to has that number at just above 90% of the rest of the world's spending for 2002, on an upward trend). It's half of US discretionary spending. Only a moron could claim that that's not 'colossal'.
GDP? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Government ? (Score:2)
Perhaps a system where any journal which sold a minimum number of subscriptions to recognised libraries coule get funding to provide a lower quality, but same content, publication online (and would be expected to)? The problem would be working out a way to make the library subscriptions have enough added
Re:Government ? (Score:3, Funny)
That's not really much of a problem. First, the President should have a "Department of Science" cabinet, where it's made explicitly clear that science from that department will be clear of political influences, then you have that department choose to fund access to journals deemed worthy by a board of pro
Re:Government ? (Score:2)
Somebody please mod this +100 Hilarious.
Re:Government ? (Score:2)
Heh. Yeah, I wasn't actually thinking of the current President when I wrote that. I just meant it's what the Office of the Presidency should have as one of its cabinets.
Re:Government ? (Score:2)
It's not about the current president. Any politician must act that way, it is their job to maximise
Re:Government ? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why the hell not? Just insert "Creation" in front of "Science" and it's a green light.
Re:Government ? (Score:2)
Maybe the better way would be to have an open acount for acedemia that could be accessed by the schools or local/state governments mirroring the content localy and providing access that way and then still requiring corperations to subscribe. It may also be worth the investment of the submitor pays but only under certain curc
Re:Government ? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Government ? (Score:2)
Also, the amount of government spending reported as "discretionary" is misleading: The Government doesn't have any money of it's own, it takes it from the productive portion of the economy.
Actually, though, the membership in the IEEE is fairly stiff, and should cover the cost of their public
Re:Government ? (Score:2)
Governments working towards the advancement of science? You Europeans think up the strangest things!
You must not have been paying attention to the US for the last four years. You see, we're at war with the tererists of mass destruction, and have had to ration "frivolities" like science, reason, openness and accountability.
I think they melt those things down to make Freedom Guns, or Democracy Bombs, or something.
IEEE Membership (Score:5, Informative)
The key is what services at what price: (Score:2)
old problem, no real solutions due to social stuff (Score:5, Insightful)
This question is hardly unique to the IEEE, all of science publication has been wrestling with these issues for about the last ten years in earnest (esp. since the widespread adoption of the net with viable mechanisms for scientific content delivery (html sucks for equations, but things like pdf make for easy distribution and consumption of papers and paper-like content)). Unfortunately, no good answers have been arrived at that I'm aware of. The professionals in the field want to publish in prestigous journals for their reputations, journals become prestigous in part through extensive peer-review processes and widespread publication, and all that takes time/staff/money. There have been some efforts and opening this process up, spurred by the high costs of institutional subscriptions (like, 20k+ USD per year for some of the chemistry journals I follow :P), but as yet I'm unaware of much adoption because, as mentioned above, an article in "foo.org" is not held in the same weight as one in, say, JACS. It's sort of a self-perpetuating cycle driven by social factors that will be very difficult to fix with technology (esp. given how very set in their ways most of the scientific community is... and I say this as a scientist).
Use the moderator / meta-moderator model (Score:5, Interesting)
In order to gain access to publish, require the authors to participate (no pay) in the peer review process much like moderators on Slashdot (but more formalized). Then have a meta peer review process to back that up. You get free peer reviewing by requiring authors to do some of that to continue to publish. But unlike Slashdot, the mod points would go to verified degreed people in academic or other research areas who would be selected first early access to do the reviews. When an article is submitted, distribute it to randonly selected reviewers. Then if it's not completely shot down, follow up with more review cycles until the reviewer sample size gives a good ranking.
Do the actual distribution via BitTorrent, with the article in the clear, but cryptographically signed by the prestigious journal. The journal's web site would have the abstracts, links, and public key.
It's not totally paid for this way, but the cost of distribution gets covered, and peer reviewers come free.
Re:Use the moderator / meta-moderator model (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Use the moderator / meta-moderator model (Score:2)
I also get asked to review papers which cite my papers. In principle that's often a good way to choose reviewers, since usually papers that cite me are on related topics, and I would be more qualified to evaluate them.
If journals shift to author-pays, the problem is th
Re:Use the moderator / meta-moderator model (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:old problem, no real solutions due to social st (Score:2, Informative)
It takes time but not money. In my field (CS/AI) the reviewers, editors and authors aren't paid for their work. And they do wonder where all the money goes that publishers collect.
As for adoption, it's certainly happened. Two examples: Journal of AI Research (www.jair.org)
The IEEE knows about feedback (Score:4, Insightful)
Positive and negative feedback needs to come from the output end to get useful results. Feed-forward from the input just creates instability. Early rocket pioneers found that out, which is why Goddard had an engine at the top, and von Braun had to develop complex gyro control systems.
There is an existing model for making access more open while preserving the useful feedback from readers - public libraries. Money goes from the state to authors based on demand for the books.
Imagine the public library which would result from the authors paying for inclusion. Come to think of it we are back to my doormat. I need to go throw away the junk mail and local politician's drivel now so I can open the door to get out to buy some coffee. Anyone have a shovel?
Re:The IEEE knows about feedback (Score:2)
Actually there are several merits to the author-pays model. As many people have already pointed out, the payment is not about the costs of publishing the material and making it available, but to cover the costs of editing and proper academic review.
So the author-pays model is about paying for the stuff you submit to be reviewed to ensure that it is of high enough quality to be disseminated via that channel.
Authors often have a reason that they are publishing research, for example they need to publish a
Re:The IEEE knows about feedback (Score:2)
This is called vanity publishing.
Re:The IEEE knows about feedback (Score:2)
No, it's not. The author-pays model does not limit submissions to subscribers only (subscription is open and free), nor does payment guarantee you publication.
You pay to have your work reviewed by an independent panel of experts in the field, to ensure its quality and applicability, and to ensure that readers can rely on the information they acquire from the journal.
The alternative (current model) is to have readers pay, which (i) reduces the potential audience of your work, (ii) reduces scientific adv
Re:The IEEE knows about feedback (Score:2)
Your parent poster is still correct. It's vanity publishing - published by author payment. Doesn't matter how you divvy up the payment, it matters where the payment comes from. Does not paying guarantee you won't get published? If so, it's vanity.
Your last paragraph makes more sense. Pay for the vetting, not the distribution. When I write, I have to have an editor go over the stuff. I pay for that editing. The end publisher does not. They are only
Re:The IEEE knows about feedback (Score:2)
But it does mean that the publisher's income is inversely proportional to the quality of that process.
There is a lower limit, set by the fact that if a journal gets too bad a reputation people will submit elsewhere, but still I think that a system where the publisher is rewarded for the quality of the content is better.
Most of the current peer reviews are not done by paid people anyway [but by people who know what they ar
Why not do as Most online mags do ?. (Score:3, Interesting)
Of course ADs are not always that forthcoming. But I guess well placed book ads would be enough to solve this problem.
And lastly, why not pick a public sponsor ?. Someone like IBM could sponsor this whole thing without a dent in the budget. Or you could ask for the public to mirror it - if the bandwidth is the real issue (of course, nothing says "COOL" as much as a local mirror of IEEE at your Uni LAN).
Re:Why not do as Most online mags do ?. (Score:4, Insightful)
Because we aren't talking about magazines, but journals. Magazines are high circulation, low content. Journals are the reverse. A company might want to get their name in front of the eyes of the 50 top nuclear phycists in the world, but if they do they would be better off picking up the phone or writing personal letters than trying to create a half page add to describe why their superconducting filament is the best for bulding accelerators.
The mass audience for journals is postgraduate students, but they have no money to speak of, and anyway there are already enough places to advertise beer.
Eliminate paper, and simplify (Score:5, Interesting)
I worked on a project once where we cooperated with a science journal. They told us that 80% of their costs were in production and distribution of paper. If they could do everything electronically, they could have eliminated that 80%. So my suggestion would be that IEEE do exactly that. Eliminate the paper. It's not like they are going to have to spend more to ramp up a web site with electronic versions of the content, because they already have that entire framework in place. If anything, their current web site is too complicated, and could be simplified (and made cheaper to operate) by eliminating a lot of the built-in toll booths.
Re:Eliminate paper, and simplify (Score:2)
Still some people just like paper. I'm just a commoner, but there is something I like about reading the news paper in the morning even though I get the major headlines everytime I go online.
Pdf or the like is a good idea because then if people want a hard copy, they can then print it on their own dime.
Still it takes money to run webserve
Re:Eliminate paper, and simplify (Score:3, Informative)
Furthermore, many au
Re:Eliminate paper, and simplify (Score:3, Informative)
I do not live in the US and I am pretty sure that more than half of that 15 dollars (earmarked for developing countries) was blown by the international packaged thank-you mail.
Simple... (Score:4, Funny)
"This cable specification brought to you by Belkin, the choice of the home user"
"Required test equipment: Craftsman digital multimeter model no..."
"Why not take a break from reading this specification and enjoy a cool frappacino - there's probably a Starbucks within 100 yards anyway"
Targeted advertising embedded in generated PDF (Score:2, Interesting)
Marketers would gladly pay to for full page advertising to the target market that downloads these documents.
Easy! (Score:2, Funny)
Toss in a couple "CLICK_YES_TO_USE_THIS_SITE_FOR_FREE_AND_GET_FREE
Strange question (Score:2, Insightful)
Even more so for content that is "dense", that is, a lot of information in a small file. A Scientific paper is maybe a single MB or two, and contains a lot of information (it is "dense"), a movie in contrast is a GB or more, and is frequently only entertainment for an hour and a half.
I consider it extremely likely that simply *allowing* distribution will be enough, the net will take care of the rest by itself.
It's harder if you insist that distribution ta
They just don't need to. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:They just don't need to. (Score:3, Interesting)
To give you one tiny example, several months ago I was working on a rewrite of the floating point library for the SDCC C Complier [sourceforge.net]. Yeah, I'm a small-time free software developer, and in that project you can find code I've contributed (mostly in the libraries).
I started working on the trig functions. There's a method called CORDIC (the alternate approach is polynomial approximation). Sine, Cosine and Arctangent are
Lower price / Higher Volume (Score:2, Interesting)
How high a volume do you see? (Score:2)
Missing data... (Score:3, Insightful)
How are we supposed to come up with a good solution if we don't even know the scope of the problem?
ie:How much money are we talking about here?
Don't go to advertising. (Score:4, Insightful)
Please don't look to advertising.
Thanks,
A random IEEE member.
---
IEEE has a reputation of impartiality. If they do open their doors to ad revenue their integrity will be questioned. The last thing we need is corporate sponsored standards and reference material which shut out competitors and amateurs.
Even if they do stay impartial, they will be questioned and it will lead to a whole quagmire of politics. It is inevitable.
I know this comment doesn't help much, but I had to say it. I commend the IEEE for trying to make reference material avilable free, but please think about this. Anyway, I don't think IEEE will read this, so bleh.
The industry should do it (Score:2)
In astronomy... (Score:3, Informative)
Outsource it to O'Reilly (Score:2)
Vanity Press (Score:2)
Speaking as a (publically-funded) publishing academic, I think that author-pays is a valid potential model and (in the UK at least), as it will raise the bar for high-quality 'traditional' publications over the existing electronic ones. Fu
if only DRM worked (Score:2)
Re:if only DRM worked (Score:2)
But the last time I worked on DRM, the requirements were just too complex: "Allow cut-and-paste of specific page range, not any advert JPGs [copyright], up to so many characters/words, up to so many times in a given date range. Allow more after end date. Allow print to local (not networked) printer up to 5 times until given date..." There was a ton of stuff like this. I doubted that anyone was
It will happen, eventually... (Score:2)
There are many ways this can work. Authors already pay, for many journals. Advertisements are another source of income. Membership fees (as in Science, the journal published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science) can also help. Finally, and most important
.com (Score:2)
Citer pays but of course (Score:2, Interesting)
But of course, it is not easy to implement. It is also a negative incentive to citing that paper which is bad since the one thing authors want is to be cited.
Puzzling statement (Score:2)
Surely the Federal Government Should Pay (Score:2, Interesting)
The non-profiting resource is obviously of great benefit to society and the country at large, helping to provide a poole of knowledgable people who can help society in this field.
Just like with all the similar things which serve society but do not make a direct profit the federal government, and therefor indirectly everyone, should contribute to maintaining a resource which is indirectly of use to everyone.
Positive examples: JAIR and JMLR (Score:2, Informative)
Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research [jair.org] and
Journal of Machine Learning Research [mit.edu]
This works because an academic journal does not really have any expenses for peer-review. Academics review for free as part of their job - it gives status to review for a prestigious jou
IEEE, already Green, considers going Gold (Score:2, Interesting)
Micropayments (Score:2)
Price drop! (Score:2)
Tax (Score:3, Insightful)
This is essentially a tragedy of the commons problem. Imagine what would happen if we tried to pay for national parks and forests entierly via usage fees and if you didn't pay for your camp permit or wilderness pass you couldn't use the area. Now perhaps a few tourist destinations might be accesible because of volume but probably the high prices would mean only the wealthy and dedicated could afford to use the forests and everyone loses. In short the private property model is really great at distributing goods which aren't duplicable (marginal cost is a large fraction of total cost per item) but goods which can be shared like parks and information is better supported by the people as a whole.
How could such a system work? Simple, an internet version of the library tax used in uk and canada. Basically the government or sub contracted companies (this could be competitive and you could probably download from amazon and have just as much privacy protection as now) would record how frequent journals/books/whatever are used (and perhaps an estimation of how useful it was by the reader) and then compensate the author proportionatly.
I know the standard reaction is to think this couldn't possible hand out money in the 'right' amounts. Yet this is just because you are stuck in the mindset that this is really property. There are no right amounts, or if there are we are far from them. When the most valuable and time consuming works (technical works, textbooks, high art) are generally the least profitable while novels make tons of money. In short we don't need to be very accurate to make sure books and journals get written just so long as we are in the ballpark of more readers=more money.
Author pays is definitely a bad idea (Score:3, Interesting)
The U.S. Congress set us on this road in 1982, when it created a centralized appellate court for patent cases called the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. A decade later, Congress ordered that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO), which up until then had been funded by tax revenues, instead fund itself through application and maintenance fees. Both changes were described as administrative and procedural rather than substantive.
From my thought store [blogspot.com]
So, it is certainly a bad idea!
Some improvements over the existing system should be thought about, rather than this.
This old chestnut... (Score:5, Informative)
Steve Harnad posted this [soton.ac.uk] to describe the problem. Text reproduced below.
[The following concerns refereed research report publication.]
What is wrong with the following picture?
(1) A brand-new PhD recipient proudly tells his mother he has just
published his first article. She asks him how much he was paid for
it. He makes a face and tells her "nothing," and then begins a long
complicated explanation.
(2) A fellow-researcher at that same university sees a reference to
that same article. He goes to their library to get it: It's not
subscribed to here; can't afford that journal; subscription budget
already overspent.
(3) An undergraduate, same university, sees the same article
cited on the Web; clicks on it. The publisher's website demands a
password: only paid subscribing institutions can have access.
(4) The undergraduate loses patience, gets bored, and clicks on
napster to grab an MP3 file of his favorite bootleg music CD to
console him in his sorrows.
(5) Years later, the same PhD is being considered for tenure; his
publications are good, but they're not cited enough; they have not
made enough of a research impact. Tenure denied.
(6) Same thing happens when he tries to get a research grant: his
research findings have not had enough of an impact: not enough
researchers have read and cited them.
(7) He decides to write a book instead. Publisher declines to
publish it: It wouldn't sell enough copies because not enough
universities have enough money to pay for it -- their purchasing
budgets are tied up paying for their inflating annual journal
subscription costs.
(8) He tries to put his articles up on the Web, free for all, to
increase their impact; his publisher threatens to sue him for
violation of copyright.
(9) He asks his publisher who the copyright is intended to protect.
(10) His publisher replies: You!
What is wrong with this picture? (And why is the mother of the PhD
whose give-away work people cannot steal, even though he wants them
to, in the same boat as the mother of the recording artist whose
non-give-away work they can and do steal, even though he does not
want them to?)
Addendum (Score:2)
There are also links on that page for other approaches.
"Professional Societies" and Open Access (Score:5, Insightful)
The standard myths about open access just aren't true. There aren't people doing worthwhile science that can't afford to publish it. Even in the third world scientists are supported by grants. Author payment is the logical way to fund scientific publication. Heck, the IEEE *itself* charges page fees (basically the same thing) for papers published in its conference proceedings (and then turns around and charges twice!) . And it's not like the authors have to pay out of their own pockets -- just like attending conferences, grants can be used. And it's a trivial part of the grant. Typical grants these days are hundreds of thousands of dollars or even millions. The $1500 needed to publish a paper in PLoS is a trivial cost compared to the cost of doing science (such as equipment, supplies for experiments, and paying grad student and postdoc salaries). What isn't trivial is the millions of dollars a year a typical university has to pay in journal subscriptions to "closed access" journals. The universities win with open access , the public wins (the get to see what their taxes pay for), the scientists win (more people read their papers) . The only losers are the publishers of closed access journals. Boo hoo hoo!
Access in perpetuity is assured... (Score:3, Insightful)
First Uesrs Pay (Score:3, Insightful)
If there's no one out there that needs the article enough to pay $100, it probably wasnt worth writing. If an author thinks what they've written is important enough, they can pay the "opening cost" to get it available for free.
Finally, IEEE should encourage companies to sponsor articles - it's a cheap way to get their name embedded into the text of an article forever, winning a little goodwill from everyone who reads the article for free.
Re:Business should pay (Score:2)
I think that's a bit naive. Once business gets involved, the IEEE would become bogged down in politics. Already, standards don't get finalised because of politics [reed-electronics.com]. IEEE standards are valuable documents, and you can be sure that having big companies play a formal
Another proved'n'true method. (Score:2)
Just put a hot babe poster on it and sell it. Just geeks read interviews on playboy, right?
As a side effect, it'll boast teenagers interest in research.
Re:The answer is already on Slashdot (Score:2)
Even if we assume that BT4 could reduce the IEEE's bandwidth costs to zero (it can't- they still need a tracker), then there are still costs of publication that have not been addressed, such as editing, compilation, peer-reviewing, etc. The problem is much broader than bandwidth.
Add in that BT4 would only offer a very questionably sized benefit: the IEEE would be transferring files on the order of 10s of MB, not the hundreds which BT typically helps. Furthermore, the files being offered are likely of such
Re:The answer is already on Slashdot (Score:2)
Re:I don't understand... (Score:2)
Well, quick example, here they pay for some, but generally not for those which I would prefer, and especially not for all of them. And I don't have the [financial] sources to pay myself for the memberships I would like to have. Now that can be some real showstopper.
Re:I don't understand... (Score:2)
The article suggests that "editing, formatting, proofreading" costs money. Yes it does. But as we provide most journals camera ready copy, the cost is born by the scientists. So the publishers do nothing, and recieve a massive amount of cash for it.
Something has to change here.
Phil