Don't Publish with IEEE (2005)
cr.yp.to
cr.yp.to
Of course one has to examine why this system is still in place. And it's mostly to do with policies in universities, where certain journals/conferences are valued more, and changing that is hard, because e.g. Springer happens to own the name. So we all pay millions to Springer, for the use of this name (that we, together, made great, not Springer), and in return, they charge us the privilege of reading the papers that we reviewed, edited, and wrote. It's insane, but it can't be changed as long as universities refuse to change.
So the hard truth is, it's not Springer/IEEE/Nature/etc, it's ultimately, us.
Relatively soon after starting work on my PhD, one of my more-experienced colleagues explained the affect of "impact factor" on academic publishing. Back then I was young and naive, and assumed that at least impact factor itself would be some kind of open system based on freely-available data.
Many years later, I read up on this and discovered Web of Science/Clarivate :(
How is it possible that scientists and academics are gated from the most important metrics based on their own output and by which they measure themselves and are measured by those who fund them?
It's completely nuts.
Your liberal ideology results in a confusion about what it means to rent-seek. This is possible only if people have no way to escape the rent. Elsevier and other companies do this by restricting the freedom of readers, since the publisher has a monopoly of access to scientific publications. It is not a matter of user behavior, since scientists cannot choose to ignore published research. The only other option available is breaking the law.
You must be joking. Academics already have huge amounts of work just to stay afloat in their fields. Now you're accusing them of not using their precious time to create new journals, so capitalism can save face. It is just nonsense like all nonsense coming from people who subscribe to capitalist ideology.
It seems what we have here is a cultural problem.
It's still the most productive system humanity has ever used at scale, but capitalism favors monopolies, cartels and every other anti-competitive behavior you can think of.
That's why we have regulations against such behavior. Even if - as it turns out- these regulations can still be weaponized by bad acteurs to ultimately strengthen their hold on markets
Because capitalism inherently favours anti-competitive behavior. If it didn't, we wouldn't have had to pass legislation to outlaw it.
Quoting "not real capitalism" as am argument is at the same level as saying "we just didn't try real socialism yet". That's technically true, too. And we likely never will.
That would make the researchers the prisoners and Springer the jailer in this analogy.
All researchers are incentivized to defect to the jailer(s)/private publishers until they know that there is a critical mass of prisoners willing to make a prison break/switch to open access journals.
Using your logic any publishing is a scam including blogging where monetary renumeration does matters [1]
> Nowadays everyone puts their papers also on arxiv.org so at least we can read each other's papers for free
Do you realize that not everyone can get their paper published in Arxiv, it's a free journal masquerading as a pre-print server? [2]
> Of course one has to examine why this system is still in place.
Hmm because it does work albeit the imperfections?
[1] How Do Bloggers Actually Make Money?
https://www.gillianperkins.com/blog/bloggers-actually-make-m...
[2] alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv:
While publishers as they exist now are not necessary for this, the publishing process does typically incorporate peer review which has significant value. I agree that things need to change, but I don't think it's true that zero value is added by publishers.
Publishers don't add value, they subtract it.
People probably have hard time undersanding this because the system is so absurd and so obvious racket they don't think such can exist.
I don't think there are any major technical challenges in publishing or peer review. It's not complicated at all. The problems are sociological.
For editors they tend to be a lot worse. E.g. with Editorial Manager adding reviewers is really painful and the search is totally useless. The process to add and be added as a reviewer takes multiple messages in a quite confusing process. Decision letters are sent with bizarre template hacks that are really easy to mess up.
Some submission systems still require formatting of images etc to some arcane formats like tiff and eps. Or to have figures and captions as separate pages. These cause significant work for submitters and are a disaster to review.
Compared to typical enterprise systems they could be even worse, but I'd say still worse than average in that class too.
Don't know if these are a significant barrier. For me they have been and I've resigned as an editor due to the unusability. But I find that they easily cause enough loss in time and nerves of authors, reviewers and editors to be of negative value.
I haven't yet run into submissions systems as arcane as those you mention in terms of format requirements, but that does indeed sound very messy and I hope I never see it.
Significant value which is given gratis by said peers, which journals use to boost their reputability and, by association, their profits. Publishers are profiting off of free labor from subject matter experts. Even more disappointing is this free labor is viewed as a right of passage. Don't forget that the author spent hundreds to thousands of dollars to access these unpaid peers. Publishers are increasingly well-known as scammy. It's why MIT ended their Elsevier contract, and why many other R1s are following suit.
Also don't get me started on the dubious quality of peer review in todays "Publish or Perish" climate.
I think focusing on Elsevier is/was a mistake. All the publishers are running the exact same racket. Even non-profits like IEEE. It's a disgrace.
But you’re right the others aren’t far behind.
Academics are periodically called upon to pass judgment on other academics. It's an unsavory part of our job, but given that there are fewer jobs, less grant funding, etc. than the number of strong applications, it's a necessary evil.
To the best we can, we try to evaluate their research record directly. But it is maddeningly difficult to evaluate work even slightly out of your field, and so journals serve as a signaling mechanism.
And here I agree again with what you say: we are paying millions to Springer, Elsevier, etc. for the use of their names. ("Ooh, this person published in Inventiones Mathematicae!") Which we we made great.
As much as I despise this system, if you believe that universities can change this, at the level of policy, I am very curious to hear what you propose.
If it's you who made the existing journals great, you probably can do it again?
There are some efforts in this direction; for example, the researchers who led the Elsevier boycott
http://thecostofknowledge.com/
started a free open-access journal
https://discreteanalysisjournal.com/about
in which I'm proud to have a paper accepted.
But it's difficult to dislodge the existing system quickly, even if everyone involved wants to.
Yes, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were some kicbacks involved, at some universities
MIT did not renew their contract with Elsevier in 2020, a major reason being their inequitable profit model, and refusal to honor open access agreements. They have a postmortem saying the loss had little impact to their researchers.
How about that for a policy change?
> we are paying millions to Springer, Elsevier, etc. for the use of their names.
As an academic researcher, you are (or your institution is) paying them millions in publication and subscription fees so you can keep your job. Publish or perish.
This ultimately sounds contradictory to your comment about MIT. It seems that by not renewing the Elsevier contract a university would have more funding for jobs?
Cost cutting and increased personnel funding are not related. Just because MIT library is saving millions by cutting a publisher agreement doesn't mean those savings will be directed towards increased staff.
This "fact" about MIT cancelling the Elsevier subscription is often cited but in isolation, it's misleading because it makes seem like MIT students and faculty don't even need Elsevier articles. That's not true.
What happened is that MIT switched to a pay-per-article or library loan method: https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/publishing/how-to-access...
MIT in providing some other access methods to the same Elsevier articles for their researchers -- at the cost of some extra inconvenient steps -- is actually proving the opposite of the anti-publisher stance: The Elsevier publisher's articles are still valuable to us.
It's the subscription they cancelled and not the articles.
Correct. Before the UC system also cancelled their subscription with Elsevier they reported paying $11 million annually.
> The Elsevier publisher's articles are still valuable to us.
Yes, but not $11 million/year with a 3 year lock-in. UC reported (at the time of ending the contract) that they have a perpetual license to ~95% of relevant work on Elsevier, so that $11 million/year went to access 5% of Elsevier's library.
What we do see is publishers shifting to open access (OA), which appears to result in lower Uni costs, but shifts the expense burden to researchers. Researchers in the UC system are now asked to use grant funding to help pay OA APC fees.
Not generally useful to show this by default, because nowadays most pages are dynamically generated and although it's technically easy to implement, the last modified header is typically not set to $now.
But Browsers are bad HTTP clients. Think about bad user experience with file uploads (no built in progress report!?), HTTP auth (not showing status, no logout etc.)
It's frequently found incorrect, both older and younger than the actual age of the document. It's a bit of a relic from back in ye olden days when websites were static .htm files in a folder, which is so rarely the case today.
It doesn't help it's also got overloaded uses via If-Modified-Since -style conditional requests.
But you are right that If-Modified-Since forces it to be a date for the complete document rather than the content, which might not be as useful to normal users for dynamic pages.
Relevant for the HN crowd is the Journal of Open Source Software: joss.theoj.org.
[I am an editor at JOSS]
But - writers could, then, and can now, use the "standard trick" to get past IEEE copyright transfer requirements:
https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/119002/7319
that works for a person who actually holds copyrights and can trasfer them - so that IEEE gets its papers, and eventually the author regains the right to also publish, modify, distribute etc. their paper.
For public domain it could be a bit trickier, and would require looking at the text of the current IEEE forms. I would guess that an appropriate loophole can be found to achieve a similar result.
https://innovate.ieee.org/techrxiv_launch/
Everybody should use preprint servers, and TechRxiv deserves more love and attention than it gets.
1. Do they still require transfer of copyright to IEEE?
2. Or, conversely, do they publish public domain articles?
2. Preprint servers aren't really for the publication of articles that were already published elsewhere. But you can have an article published on TechRxiv peer-reviewed and subsequently published in an IEEE journal -- or a non-IEEE journal, for that matter.
I'm a little salty about TechRxiv/IEEE as IEEE has a copyright transfer policy that permits posting preprints at approved servers. I applied to have engrXiv recognized as an approved server but received no response. Shortly after that TechRxiv was launched. Currently the only approved servers are still ArXiv and TechRxiv.
Discussed in 2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3051014
Furthermore, the concept of a "public domain" paper in academia just seems weird to me. the concept of "public domain" means that the contents can be reused in whole or in part without attribution of any sorts to the original author(s). that goes against the ethos of academia (i.e. plagiarism) in regards to authoring papers, so unsure what public domain for the actual paper gives users vs. the document being what I'd refer to as "freely available" (i.e. no one else can charge for access to the document, only the 'copyright' holder can).
If the author has a right to freely distribute the document (and anyone who gets the document from the author maintains the same right), I don't see what public domain "assignment" gains anyone. i.e. copyright assignment (to the publisher) with the ability to freely distribute the paper accomplishes all these goals. The only thing (I can imagine) that it doesn't accomplish is giving others the ability to collect a bunch of papers together and sell it for "profit". But that doesn't seem to be a something DJB views as needed (and in fact, rails against the publishers who are requesting the copyright assignment for that very purpose).
1. make science self-publishing using decentralised protocols the default 2. redefine traditional journals and publishers as curators or labellers on top of the network, instead of owners
Governments are another matter, because they lack the expertise to judge your work. Immigration officials in particular are something academics often have to deal with. For some type-2 fun, try applying for a visa that requires something beyond a PhD from a reputable university and a job offer.
However, and, crucially, journals differ in their effect on the consensus, e.g. IEEE or PNAS have much higher impact factors, and the competition both among researchers and institutions creates a market opportunity for gatekeeping, that naturally sorts those same researchers and institutions for the next ground of grants.
Again, I think it's hard to understand what a fix would look like, if we don't first recognize how distributed consensus should work for science. Algos like Paxos require a leader, and editorial boards for journals are effectively leaders.
Many Germans incorrectly believe that copyrights cannot be abandoned. The actual situation in German law is as follows:
"Nutzungsrechte" (literally "usage rights") include the rights of copying, modification, distribution, etc. These rights can be waived, as in other countries.
"Urheberrechte" (literally "originator rights") include reputation rights and generally cannot be waived. This protection against fraud, libel, etc. has nothing to do with whether something is in the public domain.