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Comment by micheljansen | Hacker News Reader

No longer an academic, but as a student I always appreciated it when authors put their own work on their own websites as a form of common man's dissent. I have done the same with my own meagre two publications, for which IEEE and ACM (or probably Elsevier and friends) charge up to $31 each.

Ironically, due to the closed nature of their websites and the fact that the PDFs on my websites have since been indexed by various 3rd party research portals, they now far outrank the official (paywalled) versions on the ACM and IEEE websites.

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Seriously, thanks for doing that. It's a wonderful feeling to search for the title of a paper and have the first result be a PDF link to an academic or personal site rather than a springerlink/JSTOR/citeseer result.

Citeseer is an open indexer, collecting files from the web and making them openly available. Many of those PDF links you mention are the sources for its index.

It is nothing like Springer, Elsevier, ScienceDirect, Thompson, ... websites. Please don't lump them together.

JSTOR sits somewhere in between.

You're right, I didn't mean to imply that they're all the same. It's just that when a PDF is openly available, it's often one of the first results, so seeing citeseer is a bad sign. I seem to remember them creating pages for citations they didn't have a download link for but now I can't find any examples so I may be misremembering.

Excellent work.

Never did any research worth publishing in a journal. Working a 9 to 5 job now and no longer have the opportunity to research. But I would have done it your way if I could have. An alternative now for me would be to help build open journals. The authors do the research, the publishers are simply a medium. Doesn't make sense for mediums to bite the hands of authors.

Thanks, am in a similar position now. Open journals are tricky though. I would like to think that there is a way for universities to somehow self-fund platforms for peer reviewed publications, but it just isn't happening. They keep paying huge subscription fees to the publishers of established journals with a reputation and history that is difficult to replace. It's a pretty perverse system, especially if you consider that in many countries universities are funded with public money, but I don't see it changing any time soon unless that change comes from within.

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