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.
Government ? (Score:5, Interesting)
I mean, why not just put it under a military budget or academia ?
libraries pay for it. (Score:1, Interesting)
If free online journals (aka eprints)
http://www.eprints.org/ [eprints.org]
can be hosted by the universities and their libraries, the cost will be much less than the present.
See http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.
for details.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Lower price / Higher Volume (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Charge for new issues, make the archives free. (Score:1, Interesting)
People will still pay for a subscription for new content and new information about new and emerging technologies. IEEE simply needs to stagger out the release of issues to free access by some period. I think 6 months makes sense. The magazines being released are outdated enough to justify the subscription, but new enough to help people researching for school.
Archival versions of the articles is a poor income source. Often these articles are availible in library backcopies, microfilm, or a magazine archiving service (ex. ProQuest). By allowing people free access they encourage people to understand new technologies, as well as considering older ones.
Re:Emergent Solution (Score:4, Interesting)
Warning: I did not read TFA.
Re:Emergent Solution (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Government ? (Score:4, Interesting)
GDP? (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:Emergent Solution (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
IEEE, already Green, considers going Gold (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:Use the moderator / meta-moderator model (Score:5, Interesting)
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 templates it's a complete different story.
each paper has, say, 5 reviewers.
Wow, that's a lot, so far I've never seen a conference or journal with more then 3 reviewers. I wonder what field you are working in?
I see that there is a difference between a conference where you get a lot of submissions that have to be reviewed in a very short time and a journal, where articles come continiously but probably at a lower rate. However, at a conference the author usually must register to get the paper printed, and more often then not, the registration fees are quite high. Therefore, i guess, for most conferences the costs for editing, preparing and printing the proceedings are already paid and a further distribution of articles does only require the "online" costs (whatever that includes).
Understanding Scholarship (Score:2, Interesting)
The truth is, many folks sitting on these boards are locked into a mindset--Print Article in Prestigious Journal = Credibility++, Electronic Article in Online Prestigious Journal = 0. Nevermind that by the time an article hits print, it's a year or more old (in some cases, two years old!) and, in a field like IT, probably obsolete. Thus, the print journals serve as a sort of "fossil record" of where the field has been, but it's also useful for professors hoping to move up the er..Ivory ladder. I think this problem will go away eventually as the old codgers die off, but professors are infamous for refusing to retire, and senility is something of a virtue, it seems.
As far as what IEEE is looking at now, I'd say the best thing is to do what others have already suggested and allow others to mirror the site. Perhaps they could release everything under a CC license. I agree that editing is important; however, there is an important source of revenue already in place (conference fees, membership dues). Despite what one person says, many, many people aren't going to cancel their membership just because they can get the articles for free. They already have to pay a large fee to present/attend the conferences, and membership looks good (and is even essential) on many CVs. Finally, most professors are pretty damn ethical (almost to a fault). They'll want to support their professional organization, and many feel strongly about making their articles freely available anyway (after all, they don't get paid!)
Many print journals already charge authors steep publication fees. This is especially apparent in the medical field. We're talking about authors shelling out hundreds and possibly even thousands of dollars to an editor before she'll publish the article. Aw, poor author, right? Actually, it doesn't matter one whit to the author, because the publication expenses are covered by the grant he received to conduct the research. The same is most often true for his journal subscriptions and membership dues.
Many journals are subsidized by universities, others are subsidized by private or corporate donors. Plenty of journals also have advertisements, though these ads are much lower-key than magazine ads.
Chances are, IEEE could garner support from universities, corporations, private donors, author payments, and advertisers with no problem.
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 pretty documented for the CORDIC method. For Arcsine and Arccosine, not so easy. The widely published methods work, but they're not very accurate over the whole range needed.
Turns out, there's one paper in an old IEEE journal with a modification to the standard CORDIC algorithm which makes it accurate for these functions over the entire 0 to 1 input range. I searched for days, and found lots of brief mentions of this paper, and lots and lots of descriptions of only sine, cosine and arctangent with only brief hints that it's possible to apply CORDIC to the others.
I wasn't willing to pay about $80 to download the paper, and not $250... this was just a little side project to improve the float library for that compiler for a particular architecture (coding it in assembly).
Fortunately, one of the other developers was an IEEE member and had access to the paper. After a couple days of fiddling, I figured out the matrix multiply embedded in the equation (funny how those papers hide the messy details like that), and I wrote some C code as a prototype for the algorithm.
I did end up committing lots and lots of float library code to the project.... assembly optimized versions of all the basic operations, conversions and comparisons, and natual log and e^x. Someday I'll probably get back into those trig functions... but the CORDIC code isn't a big win anymore, now that the basic operations and heavily optimized and are used by the old polynomial approx code.
So, in this one little case, there was no way I was going to shell out lots of real dollars for access to an old IEEE published paper for that algorithm. It was old, published many years ago. Having it on-line for free download probably wouldn't cost IEEE anything in lost sales of recently journals.
But not having access to the information would have cost me and the SDCC project access to the algorithm, which someday (when I get the time to get back into the project) may get coded nicely into the library and benefit all sorts of people who may use the compiler and need those two trig functions. Especially on such small chips, assembly optimized libraries are a big deal and end up saving precious bytes of ram and code space. CPU speed is also improved... but not a giant win over the polynomial approach built on top of assembly optimized basic functions.