Comment by michael_dorfman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by michael_dorfman | Hacker News Reader

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michael_dorfman

The ACM recently published an editorial in the CACM explaining the reasons behind this policy.

Here is a brief excerpt:

By owning exclusive publication rights to articles, ACM is able to develop salable publication products that sustain its top-quality publishing programs and services; ensure access to organized collections by current and future generations of readers; and invest continuously in new titles and in services like referrer-linking, profiling, and metrics, which serve the community. Furthermore, it allows ACM to efficiently clear rights for the creation, dissemination, and translation of collections of articles that benefit the computing community that would be impossible if individual authors or their heirs had to be contacted for permission. Ownership of copyright allows ACM to pursue cases of plagiarism. The number of these handled has been steadily growing; some 20 cases were handled by ACM in the last year. Having ACM investigate and take action removes this burden from our authors, and ACM is more likely to obtain a satisfactory outcome (for example, having the offending material removed from a repository) than an individual.

Personally, I gladly pay money every year to the ACM and the IEEE, as I feel I get excellent value for it. I don't begrudge them their business model, and I don't think there is anything particularly nefarious about their copyright policy (which explicitly allows authors to post freely available copies of their articles for non-commercial purposes.)

Sorry, but I couldn't disagree more.

Quality comes from the authors and the volunteers who peer review submissions, not from copyright

Plagiarism, or detection of (academic) plagiarism has very little to do with copyright. Academics has it own set of instruments to prove that somebody lifted an idea or result with out attribution and to deal with said situation, and they all do not need any copyright rule.

Quality comes from the authors and the volunteers who peer review submissions, not from copyright

This is true. But that does not mean that the publisher provides minimal value; it's worth remembering that Knuth lobbied hard to get the Journal of Algorithms moved from Elsevier to the ACM (where it became TALG) due to issues of copyright and pricing.

The ACM (and IEEE) are miles above the commercial publishers in this regard.

Plagiarism, or detection of (academic) plagiarism has very little to do with copyright.

The ACM says otherwise, and they are the ones who are actually pursuing cases. I tend to take their word for it.

You say that these publishers add value, but you don't really say what the value is these days.

Aside from review and editing, what else is really needed these days? Just throw it up on a website, make sure it gets indexed, and that's all that is really needed in the Internet age. For things like plagiarism, that really easy to detect if the source and copy are both online.

My field is more Education than CS or engineering, but I don't think publishers add value as much as, simply create a convenient baseline for readers to judge the quality of the work. Classrooms, all through grade school to College voraciously decry sources like wikipedia or... well any free media as possibly bad sourcing. With that sort of ingrained mindset, it's really no wonder why publishers still exist (and probably will continue to exist) even with the recent advances in open source.

I know from my experience though, that many in academia would not publish papers without a journal because their contracts with the university either forbid such action or part of their contract explicit state they MUST be published by a respected publisher.

>Classrooms, all through grade school to College voraciously decry sources like wikipedia or... well any free media as possibly bad sourcing.

The problem isn't that Wikipedia is free. The problem is that Wikipedia is, by definition, a secondary(where it links to a primary source) or tertiary source(where it links to another link that links to the primary source). If you're doing the proper research, you should be using primary sources as much as possible. That means you should be directly citing the paper that Wikipedia is using, not Wikipedia itself.

Plagiarism isn't a crime (care to point out the anti plagiarism law?) I don't really care what the ACM says about it. Copyright on the other hand is backed by law and therefore is a legal matter.

Valuable point. I'm not sure if I agree with the "excellent value". However, at least ACM tries to be reasonably fair. Recently they seem to have introduced a clause in the copyright transfer from which allows you to retain copyright for specific figures in your paper. Still a far way from Open Access but way better than all other major publishers. What I really hate about publishers like Elsevier or Springer is that they claim to add value by ensuring only high-quality papers get published. In reality, every major publisher, except ACM, seems to be perfectly happy with publishing a lot of rubbish research.

(My favorite: El Naschie's photo gallery in Elsevier's Chaos, Solitons and Fractals: www.el-naschie.net/bilder/file/Photo-Gallery.pdf)

When I look at the quality and quantity of journals in the archives that I get access to for a couple hundred bucks a year, I'm flabbergasted. I only wish there was something similar for the Humanities-- I'd pay in a heartbeat for that.

Elsevier and Springer's pricing, in contrast, is extortionate.

I had look up El Naschie: http://elnaschiewatch.blogspot.com/2010/05/concise-introduct...

A while back Elsevier was caught publishing fake journals for pharmaceutical companies. Classy bunch.

"I don't think there is anything particularly nefarious about their copyright policy (which explicitly allows authors to post freely available copies of their articles for non-commercial purposes.)"

This is no longer strictly true as of last year. IEEE now explicitly forbids authors from posting the officially published versions of papers. You can post preprints though, which are often better since it includes content you had to cut to avoid huge over-length charges, and any errata or updates.

Every year I struggle with whether to renew my IEEE membership, whether to continue to publish in their journals, and whether to review for those journals.

So these ACM people are legit? I get tons of junk mail from them and I don't even live in the States.

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