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Comment by michael_dorfman | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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