Matt Blaze: How ACM and IEEE Shake Down Science
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Yet as a taxpayer, I still have to buy the papers from a journal. A journal that hasn't funded the research, but profits from it.
A) What a cushy gig, I wish I had invented a professional society
B) This is an issue worth far more of the easily drummed up internet outrage than most of the silly things we all get worked up about, yet it seems to fly under the radar most of the time
The problem is systemic, and will only be changed by direct, large-scale intervention. Fortunately, the US government is really well positioned to do that. If all the NSF funded papers went away tomorrow, you can bet IEEE and ACM would change. The question is whether the government will do this, but they haven't show all that much interest so far.
Except for a select few Springer-Verlag publications (mainly the more book-chapter-like ones).
Require that federally funded papers be publicly available at no charge.
This drives up attendance fees, which are of course reimbursed from tax payer money...
If the free exchange of information promotes the growth of human knowledge, then free it ought to be. The ACM an IEEE digital libraries have improved and simplified research in many ways. The fact that they are behind a paywall and available only to members (and some institutions) is a negative.
Many alternative venues for publication are appearing, for example, Arxiv, http://arxiv.org/. Google's Knol service is also a reasonable place for articles about new work. But they do not have the cachet of a peer-reviewed archival journal.
ACM and IEEE are membership organizations. Perhaps we need a grass roots effort to change the copyright policy to, say, one of the creative commons licenses and open the digital libraries and electronic journals to all comers.
On the other hand, a well run, professionally edited journal costs money to produce. In a world where content is free, how should we monetize publications so that the staff gets paid?
So I put a sample of code in a paper to explain an algorithm and I can no longer use that code, or include it in a GPLed work?
In fact between my university's policy that it owns anything I do that can be commercially exploited, the journal claiming it owns everything and I can't post it online and the various different international laws on software patents and publishing code that has anything to do with crypto/security - in theory I would spend a year talking to lawyers before publishing each paper.
It could be that the conflict here is with our rather strange notion of intellectual property and a free market economy. Robert Laughlin's The Crime of Reason: And the Closing of the Scientific Mind makes the case that the two are antithetical. A free market requires that something be secret and not generally available to create an artificial shortage and pump the price.
Perhaps we need to rethink what constitutes intellectual property. What sort of an intellectual property policy would you propose to your university? Who should own ideas? Or should they be held in common? Will Mickey Mouse ever slip into the public domain?
Nature is paid to do two jobs.
1, Provide a copy of the paper on paper to sit in a library for 100s of years.
2, Certify that a paper has at least been written by somebody vaguely reputable and has been peer reviewed
Originally the first job was the main role, now with the internet the second is far more important. I am happy for my institution to pay for a paper copy of Nature in order that there is a universally recognised 'I am not a crank' stamp to put on my work. Think of it as an SSL-cert for my pages.
Yes I would like there to be a free open online web-of-trust for peer reviewed papers - but for now I have no objection to Nature doing that.
And I would much rather have a commercial publisher do it than have it mixed in with a professional body like IEEE/ACM/IOP who have a whole other set of agendas.
Sounds like a great idea, especially in conjunction with the boycott/strike Matt's proposing.
But how much? I'm not familiar with ACM/IEEE but looking at the journals and standards bodies that I do contribute to, I know that they don't pay authors for contributions (in some cases the authors have to pay the journals) and they don't pay editors or reviewers. As far as I can tell, they only thing they pay for is administrators and the materials to publish hard copies.
If it were a case where the content producers were getting paid for their labor, I'd have a much easier time justifying the cost for papers and standards, but paying $50-$200 per PDF is a bit ridiculous.
It's like the cable companies, they want your $100/month irrespective of whats showing - they don't want you to pay $1/show for what you actually want to watch.
Does it cost more money to produce than Wikipedia?
As I understand it, editors generally work for free. Reviewers generally work for free. Authors either work for free or pay for the privilege of publishing. Heck, authors generally supply their work already typeset. So what exactly is the cost here? I mean, I'm sure that IEEE/ACM have a staff that is used to getting paid, but what value are they adding if all the skilled labor is done for free by the community and all the technical wrangling is done by authors themselves?
I don't know where you get this. IEEE/ACM may not be paying them, but they are sure as hell getting paid to write the papers that go in those journals.
Does it cost more money to produce than Wikipedia?
The difference being that there are only 4 or 5 people in the world capable of producing or verifying the articles that appear in scientific journal.
From publishing an article in an IEEE journal? I mean, I did DARPA funded work in grad school and got it published in a journal. I understand very well that authors are generally paid. My point remains: they are not paid BY THE JOURNAL. From the journal's perspective, authors do not cost them anything.
The difference being that there are only 4 or 5 people in the world capable of producing or verifying the articles that appear in scientific journal.
And academic journals generally don't pay them a damn thing.
I'd like to know where you get this. ACM is paying nobody for writing papers. (I've published in ACM journals and conferences, btw).
From an author's perspective, paying for a tech writer to help them edit would only need to be done if they're actually bad at writing, in which case it seems perfectly fair to have them spend a few hundred dollars paying a local editor to help get their work publishable. The net financial benefit to having another published paper on their CV is certainly worth far more than whatever a good tech writer would charge.
And if the advertisements aren't bringing in at least enough revenue to cover their own costs, then they shouldn't be included either.
I think this point needs repeating. Let's remember that Knuth took the Journal of Algorithms from Elsevier to the ACM (where it was reborn as TALG) for this very reason. (Cf http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/joalet.pdf)
The ACM, to its credit, has avoided the extortionate fees charged by many of the commercial scientific journals.
That's a toughie in general, but for scientific publications the model is obvious: They get paid with government money, the same money that pays for most of them now (and that also pays for most of the scientists and the studies).
But, of course, right now there are lots of middlemen: The government gives grants to researchers, who pass on a substantial fraction of said grants to their institutions, who fund institutional libraries, who buy subscriptions from the journal publishers, who pay the editors.
We could cut out some or all of those intermediaries, but the for-profit journal publishers -- as the first on the list to be disintermediated -- are not going quietly.
To be fair to IEEE, the ACM's official policy is at least as bad.
Actually, the ACM are a little bit more reasonable: authors typically have to sign over copyright, but they retain the right to post "author-prepared" versions of papers on their personal web sites, albeit with an ACM copyright blurb attached (most people ignore that requirement, though).
and if you are very afraid, you can just remove or add one meaningless coma. that should get you covered.
disclaimer: i'm not an IP lawyer. Also I do not subscribe to ancient extortion business models like ACM
"As part of their retained rights, authors may revise their ACM-copyrighted work. If the new work is substantially developed, it is considered a new derivative work. The author owns the copyright in the new work and may do as she wishes with it. The author must incorporate a citation to the previous work with a notice ... If the work is a minor revision, copyright remains with ACM."
"The original copyright holder retains: [...] The right to post author-prepared versions of the work covered by ACM copyright in a personal collection on their own Home Page and on a publicly accessible server of their employer, and in a repository legally mandated by the agency funding the research on which the Work is based. Such posting is limited to noncommercial access and personal use by others, and must include this notice both embedded within the full text file and in the accompanying citation display as well:
"© ACM, YYYY. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in PUBLICATION, {VOL#, ISS#, (DATE)} http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/nnnnnn.nnnnnn
[1] http://www.medpagetoday.com/PublicHealthPolicy/HealthPolicy/...
All 3 organizations are effectively doing the same thing. Granted their standards focus on different areas. But why can the IETF manage this completely without charging while the others have to charge extortionate fees?
Some time in January, the IEEE apparently quietly revised its copyright policy to explicitly forbid us authors from sharing the "final" versions of our papers on the web
The thing is ... conferences (the unpaid Program Committees) are required for curation. There are too many papers published ... by attending and reading papers from top conferences, I can keep things sane. ACM and IEEE support the conferences by underwriting them. Consider a conference like SOSP ... last time I was there, I think there were 500+ academics in attendance. Despite corporate sponsors, there just isn't enough upfront cash (participant registration fees come in AFTER the venue is booked, for example) I can't see a way for academics to self-organize at this scale.
I do believe there's a plan in IEEEthat lets you download 25 papers per month for a fee. I'm not sure abotu ACM.
I wish there were a subscription plan where you could pay some fixed amount and read unlimited number of papers, but I presume they'd be wary of people (especially students) sharing access to such accounts.
Decrying that they are "socially irresponsible" and that everything should be available for free seems to be looking at this in a very simplistic way.
However, I have NEVER had an editor or other paid staff of a journal offer ANY assistance on the manuscript whatsoever, to include stuff I'd ordinarily think an editor would do as part of the job: edit. In talking with my colleagues, their experience is the same.
I'm not personally aware of ANY scientific journals where authors or reviewers are paid by journals.
I'm not interested in getting paid for publishing. However, like most other scientists, I'm tired of having to jump through hoops to get access to research data and findings that we citizens collectively paid to produce.
This is all anecdotal of course. I'm not aware of any broader literature or even editorials describing what value, if any, is added by the current system.
I can just imagine the challenge of getting such studies published.
http://www.lub.lu.se/ncsc/program.html
http://www.lub.lu.se/ncsc/program.html
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue57/waaijers-et-al/My only personal experience with editorial "assistance" is with an IEEE journal, which totally messed up one of my articles in a way I didn't notice until it had gotten published. They had moved the "related work" section to a sidebar inset, and since I'd read that section a million times I just assumed it was the same (in new location) and didn't read it closely again. Turns out they helpfully reorganized some of the references and discussion of them, so it no longer made much sense, and even had newly introduced grammatical errors.