IEEE: Pay $3000 and we'll remove your article's paywall. | Hacker News Reader

IEEE: Pay $3000 and we'll remove your article's paywall.

theinstitute.ieee.org

59 pointsblickly39 comments

This kind of gouging soon won't be a problem anymore. I'm in the process of creating an online service (launch date sometime this summer) that will provide completely free full-text access to all academic journals in one fell swoop. Think Napster for academic research.

I won't give implementation details for now, and I'm still evaluating different domain names, but it will be called Acropolis.

Yes, I know it will create a legal shitstorm, but I feel it's a small price to pay for what is at stake. To hell with it. Academic research is supposed to be free.

Well, there are private torrent sites with most journals already. Or so I've heard ;)

I haven't found any, but I guess that's the problem: they're private.

I look forward. Is there a twitterfeed / alert mailing list?

No yet, but once it launches, you'll know. :-)

I'd very much consider uploading a few of mine to that service, it's hard to justify what the IEEE deems as reasonable. Heck I don't even get access to my own papers.

Having published in an IEEE journal myself, this is false.

Unless the IEEE journals differ, you should have full rights to give people a preprint version of your paper, as well as to put a preprint version of your paper on your personal website. Not to mention that you need to ok the final version of the paper, it's hard to see how you don't have access.

The problem that needs to be solved isn't distribution, it's how to transition the traditional model of peer-review into one with much less overhead. Building a web app to allow researchers to submit their articles and have them peer-reviewed by other researchers would be an interesting project that could actually disrupt the industry. I don't think things like arXiv do that yet.

Your project seems disruptive and may cause people to talk about the issue but it doesn't solve anything, as it just undermines the system that is producing the very journals you are exposing. The same way Napster didn't solve the dependency between musicians and outdated industry business models, it just exposed how the models were outdated.

> Building a web app to allow researchers to submit their articles and have them peer-reviewed by other researchers would be an interesting project that could actually disrupt the industry.

True, but the chicken and egg problem prevents that from taking off: researchers submit to the highest impact journal they can get the article in, not the open access journals. Similarly, they won't submit their articles to such a service until it is already well established.

I'm hoping that bringing the problem to light will provide an impetus to evolve to a better system.

In a few fields the bootstrapping has taken place by having the entire editorial board of a top journal leave en masse to start a new one, which in a few cases then quickly takes over. The most successful case I know of is the Machine Learning board leaving to set up Journal of Machine Learning Research, which is now considered top-tier: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Machine_Learning_Res...

We've seen Zotero and Mendeley trying to offer a platform for that (unconvincingly if you ask me); from mass adoption of those, points for good comments can be awarded to incite proper behaviour (reddit, HNews and Quora are here to attest it works, and abuses and their proper correction are well typed); I'm expecting the Livfe extention of Mekentojs' Paper 2 to come closer to something usable.

As far as I can tell both Zotero and Mendeley tackle the personal paper management space. Did they also move into being peer-review platforms?

Hey, I work for Mendeley, so I can comment on a few things. Commenters here have noticed that it's the lamentable reliance on journal prestige that is keeping this whole dysfunctional system held together. The good news is that there are a number of smart people working on alternative metrics for papers (and for datasets and code as well) which focus on reuse, basically an extension of citation. Mendeley helps because we can collect and display some of these stats back to the academics who use our service. Not only does this allow research to proceed much faster by radically shortening the feedback cycle, but it provides a possibility that as the alt metrics get better uptake and respect, the lack of a suitable IF won't be a barrier anymore.

How are you doing this? Citeseer caches the free versions people upload to their personal sites, so they're already making a clearing house for papers that skirts the legality.

I am guessing you're crawling from behind some library account, but I'm not entirely sure how you'd be avoiding detection from the local library (assuming, perhaps wrongly, reasonable comp sec competency).

Yes, that's essentially it...

Maybe it will work like RECAP does for PACER. https://www.recapthelaw.org/ Basically, a bunch of libraries and schools who already have access will grab the articles and send them to the free archive. Of course the legal implications were less intimidating, since the documents (court records) in PACER are in the public domain and they only charge a processing fee.

I have a counter-suggestion: pay $3000 to support one of the open access journals (see The Directory of Open Access Journals "http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=home&uiLanguage=en for suggestions) and they'll let you post as many articles as you want. (Of course, I believe most of them will let you post for free, but by contributing articles and money to open access journals, you get to stick it to IEEE twice).

So... how is the tenure committee going to do with the fact that you have nothing in peer-reviewed journals?

All the journals in the list linked are peer-reviewed. We would all appreciate if you could keep your purposely misinformed snide out of academia.

It would have made more sense if it wasn't called a "processing fee". That implies they can justify the cost with specific work associated with making a paper available.

I would be happier if IEEE/ACM would typeset the damn articles. The International Conference of Software Engineering this year has hired a publishing company that have been sending manuscripts back for even the slightest failure to meet (their interpretation of) the ACM style guide.

I've gone through the process 4 or 5 times across multiple papers.

You can't charge $3000 for the benefit of putting a PDF on a website when you do absolutely nothing for the creation of it. If they did the typesetting themselves, I might (might) accept that there are some costs per article, but at this point it's obviously complete nonsense on similar old-world scales as the NYT's $41m pay wall. Putting PDFs up is a fixed cost, which, even amortized over the development of the site, is nowhere near $3000 per article over and above the revenue they are receiving from libraries and memberships.

We keep getting told that there are overheads in running a journal; that open-access can't work without significant investiture. I disagree. When all you are doing is facilitating communication (academics do essentially everything for free: write, typeset, review, accept/reject, organize conferences, and new things like storing source code and data for replicability like PROMISE or SIGMOD), you are just a middleman. All that's being provided at this point is "authority" because ACM/IEEE-stamped articles count towards tenure, and the rest don't (at least in CompSci).

This sort of thing is ripe for disruption: a competently written web app could annihilate the processes that are in place. The only problem is selling the authority. A company like Google or Microsoft Research taking to the right people and bringing them on-board for a rival publication/conference would do that (MSR are actually quite well-versed in doing conferences, the Foundations of Digital Games conference started with them, and that's now ACM for authority). I think most academics are totally fed up with the status quo, so I can't imagine that's all that hard, you just need the money to have a dedicated person to do all the "selling."

From the website:

"Open access can coexist with traditional publishing. IEEE will continue to allow authors to post manuscripts of their articles accepted by IEEE journals on their own Web sites or those of their employers."

Hence, it would be perfectly fine for me to publish on IEEE journals. Basically, if you want to read one of my articles you just have to look for it using google scholar. Is it that difficult?

...but remember this is only because they have no choice. IEEE/ACM would love to remove these clauses, but they've realized if they do, that's going to be the match that lights the fuse for all-out academic rebellion. It's not like that's a gift or some evidence that they are in any way reasonable.

They're totally aware of the precipitous situation they're in, they just don't want to/don't have the competency to fix their monetization strategy.

The fact that they're "granting you permission" to post your own paper, which you wrote at your own expense (or that of supporters you secured independently from the IEEE), and in which they have no legitimate copyright claim on your own website just underscores how dangerously close to the wind these guys are really sailing.

Unless they're actually bribing tenure committees to maintain their exclusive (and totally unearned) hold on people's professional futures, it seems like they're one coordinated action away from a richly-deserved implosion.

I use this database to check on publisher permissions. http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/search.php Authors of IEEE articles can archive pre-print and post-print but they cannot archive publisher's version/PDF. And there are lots of conditions.

they think scholars have enough money to do the research AND pay $3000 to have it openly published?

it's the beginning of the end of closed academic publishing models.

I certainly do not. It is usually enough of a challenge to cover "overpage" charges that publishers charge when an accepted article runs over the "standard" length (usually 8 pages for a standard or regular article). Often times, the "extra" pages are introduced by additional text required to satisfy reviewers. One time I was requested to convert an 8 page article submitted as a regular paper into a short paper format (4 page limit), while adding a significant amount of new content. The result? A 7 page article that ended up costing $575 to publish. We won't even talk about charges for colour figures, which can run into the thousands.

Of course the money spent on overpage charges could be better spent on graduate student stipends, equipment purchases and maintenance, software licensing, attending conferences, and other expenses incurred by an active research program.

Other open journals, while still expensive, charge significantly less than what the IEEE is proposing. The challenge for academics is that, at least for now, IEEE journals are well regarded, well cited and considered to be a prestigious venue for publication.

The idea here is that the tend of thousands your library is paying now could be used to offset your costs to go the "Gold OA" route. With this discussion of fees, I have to point out that the majority of OA journals don't charge any fees at all, and of those that do their fees are generally comparable to the page charges you'd be paying at a non-OA journal.

It's only a rare few, like these guys, Nature Publishing, and a few others that charge so much. PLoS charges about half that.

The open access publishers like PLoS also have publication charges. The fact is that properly reviewed and edited journals do add value, producing journals costs money, and at some point, somebody has to pay.

Somebody has to pay, but does everyone have to pay?

I don't understand the criticism leveled at organizations like IEEE although maybe I'm missing something. These are professional organizations and consequently non-profits. So even though they charge a lot to access the articles, it implies that nobody is actually getting rich off this.

Edit: I know that there are some for profit publishing houses, but there are also many journals published by non-profits (IEEE being one of them).

nonprofit doesn't guarantee reasonable prices. The Computer Society arm of IEEE boasts 80K members, and over $200 million dollars cash reserves:

http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/abs/html/mags/co/200...

Many people are wondering the same thing: because most of the work is done by unpaid third party, the actual cost structure doesn't seem to match their demands. From what I understand, although the publisher is an academic non-profit, they handle the conference and outsource the publishing operation to one of a handful of a for-profit operator, most of whom are Dutch, iirc (Elsevier, Reuters).

Also, "non-profit" only refers to the tax status of the organization. The fact that the organization employs management that may be grossly overcompensated is left unmentioned. In any case, the relationship is likely to be highly - and personally - profitable for the people running it.

http://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/early-retirement/

Read the section "Non-profits are NOT the Answer".

$3,000 may be too much, but I basically like this idea. Isn’t the whole premise of (peer-reviewed) open access that authors would pay fees sufficient to cover the cost of publishing and peer review, so libraries aren’t ripped off by publishers? This is at least how PLoS and other leading open access journals I’ve heard of work.

If $3,000 is a ripoff, authors would refuse to pay and will pressure IEEE to reduce prices or take their business elsewhere, which has happened in a number of fields where open access journals have sprung up. Having libraries pay the publisher is not as effective for cost control.

Maybe peer review or even journals should die? I don’t quite agree, but if it’s true, having authors pay is probably the best way of bringing this about.

This is very topical for me. I have been drafting a paper that I was hoping to submit to the IEEE. This "might" change my mind. I'm not sure yet. There are stipulations that you can publish your work on personal sites if you get permission from the organization and you include a copyright notice at the top.

Incidentally, they also have an optional but suggested charge for papers containing color diagrams and over-length papers. They say that an organization should include publication costs in their budget for the research and thus the fees are reasonable.

The author guidelines, are dozens of pages long and I only had a week to absorb them so correct me if I missed something.

Incidentally, they also have an optional but suggested charge for papers containing color diagrams and over-length papers.

These are wonderful holdovers from when people read papers in actual printed copies. When's the last time you read a paper from a printed copy from the publisher? That's why they're "optional" (and roundly ignored, AFAIK). It's another example of their completely outdated monetization methods.

"hybrid open access"

Bullshit

What you mean is "not open access." Don't lie to us.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com