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Comment by choeger | Hacker News Reader

> Going below the current 12 month ‘embargo’ would make it very difficult for most American publishers to invest in publishing these articles.

Then just stop doing it. If science needs publishers, scientists will soon notice. If not, well, good riddance!

Frankly, ACM just kills it's own value proposition. You publish with ACM, or IEEE et. al., because they propose greater reach. If scientists realize that noone pays the ridiculous amounts of money and usually go to archive.org instead, they will soon realize that they don't need ACM for publishing.

Soon after, free, or very cheap, open access journals and collections will be the go-to default. If the traditional publishers have any more value to add than a searchable catalog and a barely functioning citation index, they will compete. But I doubt it.

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You are forgetting that as a researcher you are evaluated by your own university based on where you publish. And no university will suddenly start to recognize some obscure publication venues, in fact what they will do is issue a policy that such papers will not be taken into account during evalution period.

Otherwise, I would claim that my personal web-site or my colleagues personal web-site is a scientific publisher and would publish my papers only there.

There is a very strong infinite feedback mechanism between respected publishers and respected universities forcing us to flock to such publishers no matter the costs which are exorbitantly high for most of us. But we simply do not have a choice.

> There is a very strong infinite feedback mechanism between respected publishers and respected universities forcing us to flock to such publishers no matter the costs which are exorbitantly high for most of us. But we simply do not have a choice.

In that case it is the role of the United States Government to step in and break this monopolistic-feedback loop. A simple way would be to deny any federal-backed student loans to schools who do not openly publish and continue to incestuously be involved with ACM.

Withholding money is one of the most powerful ways to change behaviors.

I am not talking about USA only. And I am not talking about direct ties between the universities and publishers. In most cases, they do not have any ties whatsover, but are clinging to such practices.

So to solve the problem you need a change at both your university, and at the publishing side. But still, as many do not have a tenure, you have to think about possible future mobility, and if your papers are published in some new venue, you are risking that in the future it might not be recognized by your future employer.

Therefore you are kind-of forced into self-censorship.

Especially if you are from a poor country where no-one pays you to do research (just teaching) and you can only go to 1 conference in a year or every 2 years. You have to "make them count".

Are there prohibitions to publish in multiple publications?

In most cases there are no restrictions where you can publish, but you simply know the fact that evaluation committees will look down upon papers published in a venue that is not among the respected ones. Some institutions, and in some cases governments, have a white-list of venues that are considered worthy to publish, so sending a paper to a venue that is not on the white-list will get it evaluated with 0 points. And you will be looked down upon by your colleagues, if you have such papers in your CV.

Publishing the same stuff at several places is considered self-plagiarism, but probably this was not what was your question about.

Yes, pretty much every serious venue is considering only papers with novel, unpublished research, so if you've published "that thing" already somewhere else then that disqualifies you from getting a well-ranked publication out of that piece of research, and it's strong disincentive to publish anything outside of the venues that 'count' for the purposes of evaluating you or your project goals.

I don't forget that. How could I? That topic was omnipresent when I was a research assistant myself. But once the /universities/ don't want to pay that premium any longer, the game is over.

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