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?"
Why is this a good thing? (Score:2)
My biggest problem is wading through the crap publications to find the good ones. 20 years ago we called publishing incremental results "salami" science. Oh goody your arbitrary change to an algorithm improved it on some meager special case test set, and your publication is so short in the intro and discussion that you don't link it to the extisting stream of knowledge or compare it broadly. Your publication is unlikely to have any value except to adding length to your resume. Otherwise is has almost ne
So true! (Score:1)
I totally agree and you can see that many people have the same problem. For example, there's things like "Faculty of 1000" which are sort of a cross between peer review and social networking. Basically, important people tell you what articles they read and liked. It's not open to everyone's vote. This helps focus this sprawling mess.
I only read the very highest impact factor journals now. I only read other journals when they are linked from an article in a high impact journal.
One needs more filtering
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So, why not go for an online rating system where the "peers" can vote on good papers?
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So, why not go for an online rating system where the "peers" can vote on good papers?
Because Digg and Reddit have taught me that often the top rated items are of poor quality, and that most really good submissions/comments don't get notably high in the rankings.
Ratings is a popularity metric, not a quality metric.
Re:Quality Rating (Score:2)
It's a start.
You wouldn't just allow mass audiences to review, you'd Meta-Rank the Reviewers. So if Dr. ______ reviewed something well, and most of his reviews are insightful, you just "follow him" or something. That's what the Peer Review is like in the normal course. "Is this article sane? I am staking a small portion of my rep giving my Yay or Nay."
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So you'd advocate non-anonymous referees?
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Two classes of reviewers.
This is a story about professional science, so already they only give the article to other professionals for the Peer review. Whether or not those Peers are revealed (intentionally - we're discussing process here) is a process choice with good and bad. In the first class at least a Senior Board needs to know that the Peers are qualified scientists. Quick example is the (GM) tag for chess grandmasters on ICC. Except for flukes, that tag doesn't get there by accident, but the real nam
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It is computationally expensive but possible to combine the web of trust with scoring systems. The name "MuVo" was originally created for a site to compete with cdnow etc and paid for by Creaf with such a feature, but they took a pass and used the name and logo for their insipid line of mp3 players instead. Netflix seems to have such a system, but maybe they do a lot of cheating.
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They tend to form alliances - you will see specific research groups collaborate together and/or cite each others work.
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You mean, like they do it now in real life?
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Yes, it's a well known fact. Somebody did a relationship analysis between the references cited between papers using computer analysis.
There would be this cross-citing of each others papers.
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Having actually submitted to top-level conferences, I can tell you that I really doubt this kind of crap would get published nowadays. At the very least, reviewers are going to demand lengthy "Related Work" and "Discussion" sections in which the authors will have to cite the reviewers.
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Not relevant... unless publication occurs before patent application, in which case, no patent.
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In the US you have a year grace period after publication, although your patent will become invalid in a lot of other places.
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You're actually proving the GP's point, while trying to disprove it. Almost everyone in the industry at the time saw the importance of Codd's work right away. That's why it took off. It was groundbreaking, it was important, and it has had a huge impact. He got it right the first time around, and that's why so much of his work is still very relevant today, decades later. But now look at some of the most recent database research. A lot of it has been focused on NoSQL crap lately. These researchers are merely
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CC.
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Could you present some evidence for your analysis? You sound as if all the "ground breaking" research in CS during the early years originated out of thin air. This is ridiculous. Much of early ideas in CS are derivatives from established concepts in mathematics, physics and philosophy. Also, creating a new idea is not the same as proposing an useful idea. For example, parallel programming techniques have been around since the early years, but it took many years of small research steps to transform these ini
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Don't feed the trolls.
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Maybe all the low hanging fruits are taken?
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Maybe all the low hanging fruits are taken?
More likely the field has just moved on to new problems and methods, and the GP doesn't know enough about these new areas to have noticed. In a lot of domains, we've gotten about as far as we can get with deterministic, rule-based algorithms, and the vast majority of research on statistical methods has happened since the beginning of the 90's. Bayesian methods in particular have proliferated only in the last five years or so.
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Papers dealing with algorithms are often merely minor tweaks to existing algorithms these days. There hasn't been anything truly groundbreaking in this field for decades.
The AKS algorithm for deterministic primality testing in polynomial time was published in 2002. Is that not groundbreaking?
This should be left to the free market. (Score:1)
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That really depends upon what they're providing and what they're charging. Guild membership in the past was hugely important as it was often times the only way in which a person could gain the ability to do the work. That's somewhat changed in recent times due to easier access to education, but even now I maintain a TESOL membership so that I can more easily keep up with developments in my field.
Even if the materials were otherwise free, there's something to be said for paying a group to screen out the crap
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Absolutely. After all, just look at what the free market has done for our banking system.
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What is this bizarre fetish people have for insisting that the centralized banking system (and the world's economy, for that matter) is in any way based on a free market?
Big Banks, Big Business, and Government are intricately intertwined; that makes what the world has a corporatist market. Capitalism is about lowering barriers to entry, but the powers that be do everything that they can to regulate competitors out of existence.
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I should add that while it's certainly possible for a monopoly to develop in a free market, it's not necessarily an inherently bad thing; as long as Walmart is putting every "Mom & Pop" shop out of business because Walmart can deliver the same/better service for cheaper/same price, then that's a good thing (Mom and Pop should find some other way to contribute to society).
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Wal-mart does not deliver the same/better service, they offer an inferior product (if it's not inferior when they start, they often demand that they product be cheaped down so they can sell it, and yet also demand that the product be no different from what appears in the same package at other retailers, thus crapping up whole product lines because of their clout) and inferior service at a price so low that it's difficult to justify going anywhere else.
Mom and pop still need to find another way to contribute
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If a monopoly no longer competes on price and/or service, then it should be easy to start a competing business. On the other hand, let's say that the barrier to entry is a matter of economies of scale: If society really is upset about being mistreated by a monopoly, then society won't mind protesting by paying extra at a competing store.
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The free market would correctly price and maximize the speed at which research is done.
What's a 'free market'? Why would it correctly price the research? Why would it maximize its speed? How do you know that maximizing speed and correctly pricing are consistent, presuming that maximizing speed reduces quality and increases cost? Are you thinking, perhaps, of the first theorem of welfare economics, which does indeed show that competitive markets (not 'free') correctly price everything under certain conditions?
It has been proven by history and is under attack by the modern socialist hippie culture.
Which history? When has research been produced by a 'free market'?
No... (Score:3)
[C]ould this be the start of something big?
Call me when you get medical researchers to sign up for something like this. CS is a small backwater that the general public (and other fields, frankly) will not notice.
It's a good thing, but not necessarily earth-shattering. It would be nice to see articles out from behind the IEEE and ACM paywalls, though.
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This is surely a start, and may be an example wich others will follow.
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Well, if I understood correctly Physics already do that. Anything that's worth reading in physic is on arXiv. The questoin is whether computer science will start following the physics style or will keep on following the medical style.
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Call me when you get medical researchers to sign up for something like this.
All papers whose work was funded by the NIH is required to be open access [nih.gov].
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I agree with the "No" for the long term. It will be nice and everyone's happy until someone (management) realizes they are not maximizing their profit potential, initializing the echelon, spanking the baby, or whatever market-speak term is popular at the time. And then start charging money.
I seriously hope I'm wrong and this works. I'm just a bit of a pessimist.
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It would be nice to see articles out from behind the IEEE and ACM paywalls, though.
Many articles available on ACM are actually availble elsewhere outside of the paywalls. Every publication I've ever made is on both ACM behind the paywall and my personal site and uni sites for free. I personally just google the name of what I want to read and it often turns up somewhere for free (legitimately). Not ideal though I know.
As mentioned by someone else, ACM has now started a linking service effectively allowing free publication through ACM. Haven't got round to sorting it for my stuff yet, but l
easy kung fu panda (Score:3)
what the fuck are you talking about. "small backwater"? eat shit.
Easy tiger. If you cherish an academic discipline so much, one would imagine that you could bring your point across in a more articulated manner. I hardly believe an academic discipline needs (or appreciate) 3-grade retorts, specially if it is an academic discipline that started as a branch of Mathematics, and in which Mathematical Logic plays an important role.
He does have a point in that CS is a very small discipline in terms of its body of knowledge (in relation to other STEM fields). CS by itself is j
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One needs to be careful with this kind of pronouncement. Computer science branches from mathematics in much the same way that chemistry branches from physics. The PC revolution matches the great blossoming of polymer chemistry dollar for dollar, decade for decade.
Just one word: octane.
Just one word: Isoniazid.
Just one word: plastics.
Just one word: lithograhy.
Just one word: Visica
ACM now provides free access (Score:2)
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Thanks for pointing that out. Download count is not really important for tenure cases but it does help gauge interest. I might just have to point my own paper PDF links to ACM now to start tracking that.
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This *is* big (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This *is* big (Score:4, Interesting)
If authors would simply ONLY submit their works to open access journals and publications, the parasites would disappear.
The problem here is that someone needs to organize these things. Someone has to pay for the bandwidth, buy and run the servers, spend effort soliciting reviewers, run the reviewing software, respond to questions, request ISBNs, submit the work to indexing sites, etc etc etc..
Open access journals address this by having a publication fee, or by advertising, or by seeking volunteers and asking for charity. Paying for publication gets blurry with vanity press, and advertising ends up sucking up to the advertisers. Volunteering and charity seem wonderful, but have to compete with lots of other worthy causes.
In CS, most of the major publishers allow you to post a copy of your paper on your personal website (as long as you also link to the official version). Finding papers outside of the paywalls is only difficult when the authors are in industry (but those aren't the publicly funded papers you're talking about anyway).
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.
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You do realize, I hope, that many, if not most, for-profit journals also have publication fees?
I don't, and while some perhaps do, I suspect most of the moderately prestigious ones don't. At least not the main ones in physics or IEEE.
When I was in grad school, if someone told my advisor that a fee would be charged for publication, he'd give them an earful and publish elsewhere. And it's quite telling that he never did this because he was never asked for a fee.
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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.
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Yeah right. Have you ever tried not paying to get your article published? Those charges are about as voluntary as paying for something in a shop.
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Yeah right. Have you ever tried not paying to get your article published?
Perhaps you didn't bother reading my earlier messages.
I didn't pay.
My adviser didn't pay. The one time he was asked to pay for publication, it was because he had submitted to an open access journal. When he found out they required money, he remarked that the open access model's going to fail because they require money whereas the traditional ones don't.
If you paid, then either:
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Your adviser is just not telling you.
OK - Now you're just being stupid.
Explain why my adviser would complain about paying for open access journals, and comment that normal journals don't ask for money, while paying for money in normal journals.
But the fees are there, and you should see what the likes of IEEE or Science charge the University library for a subscription.
I'm well aware of it, and it's completely irrelevant. We're discussing if one has to pay to publish, not if one has to pay to subscribe.
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Either you're submitting to an open access journal (or something similar (e.g. PubMed)), or want special treatment (e.g. color), or it's a sleazy journal, or things are just wildly different in your discipline than in physics and IEEE.
Mind you: I dealt only with journals published by a professional organization (IEEE, ACM, APS, etc). Perhaps some journals published by private companies (Springer/Elsevier) may require payment, but I don't think it's common for the "good" journals.
There's a reason why a lot o
Funding needs are far smaller (Score:2)
The problem here is that someone needs to organize these things.
True, but not relevant. The necessary organization and infrastructure can be done quite cheaply, if organizations are willing to move from the past to the present.
Someone has to pay for the bandwidth, buy and run the servers, spend effort soliciting reviewers, run the reviewing software, respond to questions, request ISBNs, submit the work to indexing sites, etc etc etc..
I think you're grossly overestimating the costs if they switch to an exclusively digital realm, which is where they need to go. Bandwidth and running basic servers (which is all that's needed) are commodities. WebHostGiant will provide bandwidth and basic servers for $2.79/month with no bandwidth maximum. A serious journal will want more th
There are two aspect of the problem (Score:4, Interesting)
And the one that matter for me (a researcher) is how I get funded. Basically I get funded when I can convince other people of how good I am. To estimate that, they look WHERE I am publishing my research; and most likely, they do not look at WHAT I am saying. The name of the conference or the journal is what matters most. What you are actually doing is not so important.
I know that suck. It makes me cry at night. But that is what it is. If I came not to publish in journal with no public open access, I won't be able to publish in journals that matter in my field. So I won't get funded.
I totally agree the public should be able to read what ever we write. But I can not give up my funding. (For the record: no funding, no food on my table.)
Moreover, that's basically a false issue. All journals and conference allow you to publish pre-print on your website. All my papers are on my website or in arxiv. So I am not even sure it matters so much.
Of course, complete open access for everybody would be better.
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.
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It is completely hyprocrit to submit paper to a journal and refusing to review for it on moral grounds.
When you submit a paper you consume reviewer time from peers. You have to give that time back to the community by reviewing papers.
You could claim that the publisher makes a lot of money on free labor from reviewers and that reviewers should be paid (which would make sense). But that wont make you progress toward open access journals.
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Researchers get paid to get great papers published in renowned conferences or journals. This is the metric of success that will be used against them. No papers in top conferences, you are done. Peer review instead is basically on a volunteer basis. Your company won't fire you for not reviewing for this or that conference.
So, these researchers are doing what they can without jeopardizing their careers.
If you have a better idea on how to push for openness in research that does not involve self immolation I th
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).
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If your institution has in-house counsel, ask them how small a change you could make in a figure to have it be considered a 'different' figure for copyright assignment purposes. If you do, I'd be interested in the answer you get.
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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).
This is one of the parts I consider most shocking. I could understand Springer or one of the commercial publishing houses being a pain like this -- they are for-profit businesses whose primary interest is supposed to be sustainability of their business. But IEEE, ACM, and others are learned societies -- charitable institutions whose raison d'être is to support science (rather than enclose and restrict it). And yet there are so many examples of them being, well, uncharitable and inhibiting the use of
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This is one of the parts I consider most shocking. I could understand Springer or one of the commercial publishing houses being a pain like this -- they are for-profit businesses whose primary interest is supposed to be sustainability of their business. But IEEE, ACM, and others are learned societies -- charitable institutions whose raison d'être is to support science (rather than enclose and restrict it). And yet there are so many examples of them being, well, uncharitable and inhibiting the use of science by scientists. They should be the ones pushing open access, not having to have it pushed upon them.
I'm not sure about IEEE and ACM, but in chemistry, ACS (who publish the top chemistry journals) are huge opponents of open access. They are a professional society, but member dues are a drop in the bucket compared to what they make from the journals. I wouldn't be surprised if IEEE and ACM are the same. It feels dirty that they used my dues to lobby congress against all of the open access policies.
False issue? (Score:2)
And universities having to pay extortion money ($5,000 per year in some cases for a single journal) is also a non-issue?
You are simply describing as inevitable the mechanism by which parasites exploit your work, so you are just looking for the quick way out. Shortsighted.
Not a false issue.
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Well, of course it is a real problem. I would love the system to just switch to openness in a night. I believe if the publication system was open it would work. Right now if I do not publish in high end journals (which happen to have access fees), I won't get funded. If I don't get funded I don't get paid and I need to find another job. Then who cares I am not reviewing for these journals? I am out of the system anyway.
Of course I would love all publications to be freely available. But right now, it is a mo
circular butt sniff (Score:2)
It has become increasingly apparent that the value of education received in upper crust undergraduate programs or post graduate degrees rarely equates to the dollars spent. What people are really paying for is a premium rung on the social graph.
It's rarely clear how one recovers the investment, unless you're one of the bright lights that launch onto a lucrative career track. How many humanities graduates eve
This is something BIG... (Score:2)
NO
This is what politics looks like now
Preprints are not bad! (Score:2)
I don't know why the second link is really upset about the preprint policy. In fact, not long ago being allowed to put preprints on a public server was considered a victory.
For those who don't know, a preprint is not the version you submitted to the journal, but the version just prior to publication: After the peer review, after the formatting, and after all corrections. It's the one they send to the author saying, "This is how your paper will look - do a a quick glance to see if you find any errors." It's
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Nope, the preprint at least some journals allow you to publish on a preprint server is the version prior to you submitting the paper.
Perhaps in some journals, but not in IEEE, which is one of the two he was complaining about:
From the IEEE submission guidelines [ieee.org]:
Proof: Before publication, proofs will be sent to the author (or to the contact author who submitted the paper). Typographical, illustration problems and other errors should be marked according to the instructions accompanying the proofs. This is not the time to rewrite or revise the paper, and the cost of excessive changes will be billed to the author. However, it is important to review the presentation details at this time and carefully check for any errors that might have been introduced during the production process.
Emphasis mine.
They send you the proof (which is the preprint) after all the refereeing is done and any changes the referees suggest have been implemented.
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That is a "proof", not a "preprint".
In the journals I've published in, the two are the same.
And given the context of the discussion, the version the IEEE allows you to publish is almost the proof. From the complainer's own page, he links to the FAQ [ieee.org], where it says:
The new policy retains substantial rights for authors to post on their personal sites and their institutions' servers, but only the accepted versions of their papers, not a published version as might be downloaded from IEEE Xplore®.
And the first question in the FAQ is:
How does IEEE define an "accepted" version?
An accepted manuscript is a version which has been revised by the author to incorporate review suggestions, and which has been accepted by IEEE for publication.
This isn't the final formatted version, but the version that is final in content. No more revisions will be made. It is the one accepted by peer review, and is for all practical purposes as good as the published one.
Granted, the FAQ does define a
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Print and distribute hard copies, for which they charge outrageous subscription fees anyway.
ACM and IEEE institution subscription fees are not as outrageous the major culprits (Elsevier, etc). That's generally true for professional organizations - they charge universities considerably less, and are more receptive to feedback from them. Usually when universities complain about the costs, they're not complaining about ACM or IEEE
To add insult to injury, we have to assign copyright over to the publisher so we have to ask for permission to use our own work in the future.
Yes, but wouldn't you agree that the IEEE (and probably the ACM) are not being too unreasonable by allowing you to publish the proof/preprint? As you yourself noted, it's as
Something big? Let's hope so! (Score:2)
It's likely that many people here are sick of all the expensive academic periodicals that often contain interesting articles, but that almost no one without access to a university library can read... except perhaps for a summary. One of my interests is herpetology, which is pretty obscure, but nevertheless, there seem to be hundreds of periodicals published on this one very narrow subject alone. I've also heard stories about researchers who were upset to find out that their own papers, once published and o
not a very controversial pledge (Score:2)
Hidden "knowledge monopolies" allows feudalism (Score:1)