Elsevier = Evil
scienceblogs.com
scienceblogs.com
Hello,
It's been with great pleasure that I've been able to watch Representa-
tive Issa speak out against SOPA in the Judiciary.
However, I'm concerned at seeing him offer "H.R.3699 -- Research Works
Act" as such an act is a major blow to scientific openness.
As you may well be aware, in many nations it's a requirement that re-
search receiving federal funds (i.e. research at taxpayer expense) be
made available for free to the public. The recent policy proposal by
the NIH would move the US towards a similarly open policy and would
help foster the openness of research that made this country such a
leader in science and technology for so long.
Unfortunately, companies like Elsevier have increasingly treated pub-
lishing as a private cash cow, banking (in part) on the burgeoning
costs of a university education to widen its coffers. The journals
published by Elsevier cost colleges and universities millions of
dollars each year and burden students with growing debt (and for
others, preclude the possibility of higher education at all).
I ask that Representative Issa revisit his stand on this issue.
Thank you.[Edit: Sorry, checked on my screen but didn't realize my resolution was too high to show me if it broke lines.]
On a sidenote, does a group that focuses on gov't relations and PR exist that represents what would is largely the consensus HN community interest - i.e. making the case to elected officials and the public what sort of laws would improve prospects for technical innovation. The EFF focuses largely on digital civil rights, but that certainly isn't the only realm where Washington, Sacramento, Albany, etc. affect us.
Thoughts?
Right now, I think the startup visa thing and opposition to new stupid laws like sopa/pipa is all I have mental bandwidth to care about.
1) Phone calls 2) PERSONALIZED dead tree letters (not form ones, photo copies, or from one of those letter generators)
YMMV depending on who your rep is though.
excerpt:
At the end of 2003, the entire editorial board of the Journal of Algorithms resigned to start ACM Transactions on Algorithms with a different, lower priced publisher, at the suggestion of Journal of Algorithms founder Donald Knuth.
The actual letter (pdf): http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/joalet.pdf
The "1 year after initial collection" allows slower writers to get publications in the pipeline before unleashing their data to the hounds of "competing" scientists.
Scientific publishing is broken. Industry and government have limited access to modern, relevant academic research. Utilizing the best science for science, management, construction and business decisions shouldn't be a daunting task that I usually chose to overcome by contacting current individuals in academics with access to publications.
I found out about a pretty cool project called "Total-impact". They're basically tying together metrics from a vast number of social networking/online sources into one view about a specific scientific article to understand how far this research is reaching as well as the overall impact of how many people are talking about it. You can view it at http://total-impact.org/, and there is a sample collection at http://total-impact.org/collection/MqAnvI.
I'd also recommend looking at Science 2.0's FriendFeed, http://friendfeed.com/science-2-0, as it contains some pretty interesting content.
I really hope that the "open science" movement gains more traction in the immediate future.
Open science/sharing the data can work as a voluntary movement, it has not been captured by private interests, but I'm really interested in seeing Open Access pan out before that. The current policy, if I'm reading it right, is saying that the manuscripts must be submitted to PubMed Central, but PMC or the researcher (whoever decides to trigger it first I imagine) only has an obligation to release them after twelve months. If PubMed Central doesn't release the research instantly and the researchers aren't aware of their rights or are subjet to some pressure/contradicting (possibly illegal) agreements, there's a loophole in the policy as written.
I agree the proposed act is bad, but the author does not do himself any favors by quoting such bone headed nationalism. Surely anyone with a mild grasp of the way world works knows that the profits go to the _shareholder_, not to the headquarters.
Elsevier's shareholders are all over the map. Their headquarters are based in the Netherlands for tax reasons but it does not mean they don't pay tax in the US on profits made there.
Understandably, a company providing jobs and infrastructure investment in the local area can always strike a deal.
In the end I'll have done the research, the writing, the editing and the formatting but of course the end product will in all likelihood be behind a paywall (this is sort of my own stupidity for rushing to get something published under the advice of a prof). There's no reason individual academic communities can't decide that they should establish there own reputable and open access journals.
Although I am friends with David (the author of this blog post), I do not agree that open access is fundamentally the wrong model, but his argument is not without merit.
I'd guess that a "teaching university" would have nearly the same need for access (if the teaching is any good), but much less need for submission, compared to a "research university", so the teaching university should benefit from shifting cost from access to submission.
Publishing in ACM and IEEE conferences are essentially author-pay. Technically, you don't pay to publish in the conference, but you must pay to register for the conference. And most conferences have a rule that if you don't register, you can't publish.
There are many objections to the ACM and IEEE practices about maintaining paywalls, but I think that as professional societies, their policies can change. The for-profit journals, on the other hand, probably cannot survive if they allowed such open access. And nor should they: their business model is no longer valid.
* The review process for conferences is necessarily compressed relative to journals. This usually lowers the quality of reviews and also limits paper length.
* It is difficult to "grow" a highly selective conference, so the acceptance rate is usually quite high. This means that archaic tenure review committees evaluating on where you publish instead of what you publish will ascribe little weight to your conference papers. If people are not submitting their best work to a conference, it can't afford to be overly selective. This is much the same problem that new journals have, but worse because conferences usually have to reach a critical number of people to be considered a success.
This means that archaic tenure review committees evaluating on where you publish instead of what you publish will ascribe little weight to your conference papers.
Not in CS, in my experience. People in CS know which are the highly selective (what I have always heard called "top tier") conferences. In my experience in industry and academia, conferences are our primary consideration and journals are an afterthought. (Sometimes not even a thought.) The CRA memo is from 1999. I think most people have caught on by now.
It's remarkably short-sighted and pointless legislation, unless the real objective is to start suing authors for forwarding PDF copies of their work and related documents to interested parties without journal access.
With your model extremist churches or other organisations could lobby to reduce employment rights for women/LGBT etc. For example returning to the 50's wheer women who got married had to resign like they did at one compnay I used to work for.
A company with progressive views on employment issues say Google would be banned from lobbying against this.
And you would have od position where say the UAW could put their views on a bill concerning the Auto industry but Alan Mulally could not - not teribly fair.
1. Money is an extremely effective campaign tool, so effective that it is almost impossible for a candidate with no money to get elected, no matter how popular their views are. Since quite few constituents contribute money, and individual people don't speak with sufficiently organized objectives, politicians are only very weakly accountable to their constituents.
2. The promise of a high-paying job after congress, along with other benefits, influences the decisions of our elected officials.
To make politicians accountable to their constituents, we have to solve the first problem. Since advertising costs money and seems to be necessary for a campaign, this suggests finance reform along the lines that Lessig suggests (http://rootstrikers.org), whereby constituents control campaign funding, all in small-dollar amounts.
Oh and move to a fully professional Judiciary elections to Judgeship are far more corrupting.
Oh and you didn't answer my point about other actors do you want to have an internet where telcos and ISP can't lobby for common carrier status welcome to the church and other interest groups deciding what is allowed on the internet
Or would you care live a society like China or Russia where your employer and your job and sweat equity can be expropriated.
However, what you do need is an "impact rating" calculated by Web of Science(TM). That rating is based on the number of citations articles in your journal gets from other rated journals.
Since your journal is new, it won't have an impact rating, meaning scientists won't publish in it, meaning you won't get an impact rating.
But the alternatives exists, e.g. Bentham and Hindawi are both running spamtastic marketing campaigns for 100s of open access journals, most with none or negligible impact ratings.
There are good and successful ones too. PLoS have very high quality open access journals. Expensive, though.
But again, there are good open access journals out there. And even traditional publishers typically allows open access for individual articles for an additional fee. While these fees may seem high, they will typically only constitute a small fraction of a research grant, so if you care and you plan for it in advance, there is really no excuse for not going open access.