Matt Blaze: How ACM and IEEE Shake Down Science • Hacker News Board

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

#41

Post by quag » Wed, Mar 02, 2011, 1:02 AM UTC

iqster wrote: post #30

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 ... la…

And yet, linux.conf.au managed to self-organize at this scale with a completely different set of organizers each year.

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

#42

Post by patrickyeon » Wed, Mar 02, 2011, 1:22 AM UTC

larsberg wrote: post #40

Lewisham wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 govern…

As another PhD student, I don't really get all of the rage. In practice, everything post-1997 is easily accessible, and if you're searching through CiteseerX you probably won't even notice the difference. I won't claim it's a great system, but there is observational equivalence with "free and unencumbered publication" modulo a 3" x 4" blurb of text on the lower-left of the first page of the document. Except for a sel…

When you are no longer a student, it will not be so easy. IEEE and ACM (at least) will charge you for articles, and without an IP address registered to your university, all you'll see is abstracts.

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

#43

Post by waterlesscloud » Wed, Mar 02, 2011, 2:39 AM UTC

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…

If Obama is serious about encouraging innovation, here's an easy way to do it.

Require that federally funded papers be publicly available at no charge.

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

#44

Post by bbb » Wed, Mar 02, 2011, 2:40 AM UTC

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…

Not to forget that IEEE/ACM also take a big cut out of every conference budget. In fact, the cut is significant enough that budgets are fudged (frequently at that, I suspect).

This drives up attendance fees, which are of course reimbursed from tax payer money...

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

#45

Post by bbb » Wed, Mar 02, 2011, 2:43 AM UTC

modeless wrote: post #22

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

Oh, sure, Springer will also let you publish "open access" articles. However, the publishing fee goes up from a few hundred dollars to a couple of thousand. Now find me a prof that will actually sacrifice his precious grant dollars for that.

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

#46

Post by mechanical_fish » Wed, Mar 02, 2011, 3:30 AM UTC

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…

how should we monetize publications so that the staff gets paid?

That's a toughie in general, but for scientific publications the model is obvious: They get paid with government money, the same money that pays for most of them now (and that also pays for most of the scientists and the studies).

But, of course, right now there are lots of middlemen: The government gives grants to researchers, who pass on a substantial fraction of said grants to their institutions, who fund institutional libraries, who buy subscriptions from the journal publishers, who pay the editors.

We could cut out some or all of those intermediaries, but the for-profit journal publishers -- as the first on the list to be disintermediated -- are not going quietly.

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

#47

Post by te_chris » Wed, Mar 02, 2011, 3:34 AM UTC

oiuyhtgyhuj wrote: post #23

Anechoic wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You should be upvoted more. These organisations exist to extract millions of dollars of subscription fees out of University Libraries each year.

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

#48

Post by eegilbert » Wed, Mar 02, 2011, 3:37 AM UTC

Lewisham wrote: post #28

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 govern…

The NSF has recently instituted a mandatory data-sharing policy reminiscent of the NIH. So, it's not unthinkable that they would do this.

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

#49

Post by eegilbert » Wed, Mar 02, 2011, 3:42 AM UTC

drallison wrote: post #4

oiuyhtgyhuj wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No problem with Nature's paywall they are a business. I do have a problem with no longer owning the copyright to a paper I wrote and gave to them for free - or even paid page charges to some journals So I put a sample of code in a paper to explain an algorithm and I can no longer use that code, or include it in a GPLed work? In fact between my university's policy that it owns anything I do that can be commercially ex…

Just because the journal Nature is run as a business does not mean that charging for access to published material promotes scientific progress. If the growth of scientific knowledge is of primary importance and depends upon the wide dissemination of knowledge, charging for access is socially irresponsible. It could be that the conflict here is with our rather strange notion of intellectual property and a free market…

Nature, however, provides a very unique academic service: they can give you a "no" within two weeks. This is light-speed in academic publishing. Most ACM conferences take 4 months to return an answer. Journals in other fields can take years.

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

#50

Post by rick_2047 » Wed, Mar 02, 2011, 4:39 AM UTC

MichaelSalib wrote: post #16

drallison wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are different kinds of journals and so the costs and benefits can differ widely. Academic archival journals typically have volunteer editors whose salary is paid for by their employer rather than the publisher (usually a non-profit society such as ACM). These editors manage the peer-review and acceptance process. Once the papers have been accepted, they go into production and, depending upon the journal and its…

I think it helps to distinguish different types of costs. If we're talking about general technical writing editing or assistance getting something latex-ified, that seems like the kind of thing that can be readily pushed back onto authors themselves. For example, the volunteer editor could easily tell an author: "the reviewers loved your work, but you need a technical editor to make this acceptable for publication: h…

I think what you are suggesting here is already being done. I don't have much experience but from what I hear you are required to submit a "Camera Ready" copy of your submission after you have been excepted. That would mean a well formatted and edited work.