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Matt Blaze: How ACM and IEEE Shake Down Science

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Re: Matt Blaze: How ACM and IEEE Shake Down Science

#21

Post by metageek »

logjam wrote: post #13
voracioush wrote: post #8

Don't these commercial publishers hire editors who actively contribute/edit to papers which they choose to publish? Also, don't many of these publishers pay authors for work? Decrying that they are "socially irresponsible" and that everything should be available for free seems to be looking at this in a very simplistic way.

I've had several peer-reviewed papers published. The reviewers (who are unpaid) often have excellent suggestions and often do the work of an editor. However, I have NEVER had an editor or other paid staff of a journal offer ANY assistance on the manuscript whatsoever, to include stuff I'd ordinarily think an editor would do as part of the job: edit. In talking with my colleagues, their experience is the same. I'm not…

>I'm not aware of any broader literature or even editorials describing what value, if any, is added by the current system.

I can just imagine the challenge of getting such studies published.

Re: Matt Blaze: How ACM and IEEE Shake Down Science

#22

Post by modeless »

drallison wrote: post #2

Matt Blaze is right on point, as usual; in fact, he probably does not go far enough in his critique of scientific publishing. Commercial publishers from Nature to those on the long tail are as bad or worse. The "in your face" commercial paywall in front of most technical journals is a frequent user experience here on Hacker News. And counterproductive to doing good science and engineering. If the free exchange of inf…

Physical Review Letters recently adopted a system where authors can pay a fee to have their submissions published under a Creative Commons license. The fee replaces journal subscription/paywall revenue.

http://prl.aps.org/edannounce/CC-launch-press-release

Re: Matt Blaze: How ACM and IEEE Shake Down Science

#23

Post by oiuyhtgyhuj »

Anechoic wrote: post #6
drallison wrote: post #2

Matt Blaze is right on point, as usual; in fact, he probably does not go far enough in his critique of scientific publishing. Commercial publishers from Nature to those on the long tail are as bad or worse. The "in your face" commercial paywall in front of most technical journals is a frequent user experience here on Hacker News. And counterproductive to doing good science and engineering. If the free exchange of inf…

On the other hand, a well run, professionally edited journal costs money to produce But how much? I'm not familiar with ACM/IEEE but looking at the journals and standards bodies that I do contribute to, I know that they don't pay authors for contributions (in some cases the authors have to pay the journals) and they don't pay editors or reviewers. As far as I can tell, they only thing they pay for is administrators a…

The reason is that live on institution subscriptions. If they switched to an iTunes $5/paper download then there would be less pressure on university libraries to pay $1000s/year for a subscription (the library pays a lot more than members for a journal)

It's like the cable companies, they want your $100/month irrespective of whats showing - they don't want you to pay $1/show for what you actually want to watch.

Re: Matt Blaze: How ACM and IEEE Shake Down Science

#24

Post by neilc »

I thought this was obvious to everyone? ACM, IEEE, and the rest of the scientific publishing establishment are antiquated dinosaurs. They will eventually adapt to the existence of the Internet. Thankfully, in CS, they are mostly just a nuisance -- access to the scientific literature in other fields is significantly less open.

To be fair to IEEE, the ACM's official policy is at least as bad.

Actually, the ACM are a little bit more reasonable: authors typically have to sign over copyright, but they retain the right to post "author-prepared" versions of papers on their personal web sites, albeit with an ACM copyright blurb attached (most people ignore that requirement, though).

Re: Matt Blaze: How ACM and IEEE Shake Down Science

#25

Post by hfinney »

Part of the problem is that the journals are part of a complicated infrastructure for judging academic quality. The best authors compete to get published in the best journals. The best journals are based on years or decades of reputation and history. You can't create de novo a system to replace this instantly. There is a chicken and egg problem to be solved before we have free publishing venues with a widely accepted reputation for only publishing the best papers.

Re: Matt Blaze: How ACM and IEEE Shake Down Science

#28

Post by Lewisham »

krschultz wrote: post #20

Most white papers are written by professors and students who are supported by grants. These grants generally come from DARPA, the NSF, or other federal programs. All that money comes from the taxpayers. Yet as a taxpayer, I still have to buy the papers from a journal. A journal that hasn't funded the research, but profits from it. A) What a cushy gig, I wish I had invented a professional society B) This is an issue w…

This is the most aggravating part of it for me (I'm a PhD student who has stuff in the ACM library); I'm paid for by the NSF, but my understanding is that the NSF does not require the papers to be freely available. I think there may be some countries/grants that do force open the publications they funded.

The problem is systemic, and will only be changed by direct, large-scale intervention. Fortunately, the US government is really well positioned to do that. If all the NSF funded papers went away tomorrow, you can bet IEEE and ACM would change. The question is whether the government will do this, but they haven't show all that much interest so far.

Re: Matt Blaze: How ACM and IEEE Shake Down Science

#29

Post by patio11 »

logjam wrote: post #13
voracioush wrote: post #8

Don't these commercial publishers hire editors who actively contribute/edit to papers which they choose to publish? Also, don't many of these publishers pay authors for work? Decrying that they are "socially irresponsible" and that everything should be available for free seems to be looking at this in a very simplistic way.

I've had several peer-reviewed papers published. The reviewers (who are unpaid) often have excellent suggestions and often do the work of an editor. However, I have NEVER had an editor or other paid staff of a journal offer ANY assistance on the manuscript whatsoever, to include stuff I'd ordinarily think an editor would do as part of the job: edit. In talking with my colleagues, their experience is the same. I'm not…

The ACM, which is publishing an article by me, offered extensive editing, mostly to help me hit their desired tone. (The article was adapted from something I wrote outside of my academic "voice.")

Re: Matt Blaze: How ACM and IEEE Shake Down Science

#30

Post by iqster »

As someone who has published papers in ACM and IEEE conferences, I have had similar feelings to that in the article.

The thing is ... conferences (the unpaid Program Committees) are required for curation. There are too many papers published ... by attending and reading papers from top conferences, I can keep things sane. ACM and IEEE support the conferences by underwriting them. Consider a conference like SOSP ... last time I was there, I think there were 500+ academics in attendance. Despite corporate sponsors, there just isn't enough upfront cash (participant registration fees come in AFTER the venue is booked, for example) I can't see a way for academics to self-organize at this scale.

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