Live data from Hacker News

Academics posting their papers online in tribute to Aaron Swartz

sciencecitizen.org

51–54 of 54 posts

Re: Academics posting their papers online in tribute to Aaron Swartz

#51

Honest question: why don't researchers normally do this? Those in the software development do this all the time: set up a tumblr/Wordpress/whatever blog and publish our findings. If I had a dime for every time I saw an article about some benchmark of tech X vs Y... If every research lab ran a blog-type setup where they published their findings (along with any other updates), the whole field could be revolutionized. T…

You are rising an important point. An answer why is: http://www.scottaaronson.com/writings/journal.html

The short story is that scientist need "credit", as there are much more people that positions (not even to get a good position, just to get any). But the credit is given only for two things: publishing in already well-respected journals and getting citations.

In principle there is not problem with establishing an truly open journal. In practice - almost no one does (because doing anything but writing papers will very likely result in loosing academic job - as there is no credit for that, regardless how important).

However, there are people trying change the system; I wrote about it here: http://offtopicarium.wikidot.com/v1:open-science-2-0

Re: Academics posting their papers online in tribute to Aaron Swartz

#52
post #45
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Run a Tor exit node in an academic network that is > blessed by JSTOR, Springer, etc. I like this plan. But what should the school do when Elsevier cuts them off? Maybe we need moles in the publishing companies themselves.

> But what should the school do when Elsevier cuts them off? Get more schools to do it. Get as many schools as possible to do it. How many schools would Elsevier be willing to cut off just to stop a few technically proficient users without university affiliations from accessing their stuff for free?

https://groups.google.com/group/science-liberation-front

Re: Academics posting their papers online in tribute to Aaron Swartz

#53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One reason is that some journals require you to transfer copyright to them as a condition for publication. Usually, the journals then license the paper back to the corresponding author for limited personal distribution, but sometimes it may be the case that posting your research on your website would be a violation of copyright. For an example, here's the transfer form for the American Chemical Societies journals: ht…

IEEE has a similar copyright assignment requirement. If you want your paper in an IEEE venue (which includes many of the top engineering, robotics, signal processing, etc. conferences and journals) you are not allowed to publish it anywhere else, including on your own web site. Institutions pay big bucks to subscribe to IEEE Xplore for online access. Many people work around this by self-hosting a very similar paper,…

This is not completely true. "Authors and/or their employers shall have the right to post the accepted version of IEEE-copyrighted articles on their own personal servers or the servers of their institutions or employers without permission from IEEE..." [1]. They also allow preprints on personal sites. The other major publishing organization in CS, ACM, has a similar policy.

[1] https://www.ieee.org/documents/ieeecopyrightform.pdf

Re: Academics posting their papers online in tribute to Aaron Swartz

#54
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IEEE has a similar copyright assignment requirement. If you want your paper in an IEEE venue (which includes many of the top engineering, robotics, signal processing, etc. conferences and journals) you are not allowed to publish it anywhere else, including on your own web site. Institutions pay big bucks to subscribe to IEEE Xplore for online access. Many people work around this by self-hosting a very similar paper,…

This is not completely true. "Authors and/or their employers shall have the right to post the accepted version of IEEE-copyrighted articles on their own personal servers or the servers of their institutions or employers without permission from IEEE..." [1]. They also allow preprints on personal sites. The other major publishing organization in CS, ACM, has a similar policy. [1] https://www.ieee.org/documents/ieeecopy…

That's interesting, I didn't know that clause. It looks like they explicitly allow posting the "accepted version", with the addition of the copyright attribution to the IEEE (i.e. not actually the version I wrote that they accepted!). Most people don't bother with that, and the IEEE hasn't hassled anyone I know about omitting the notice.

However, you are definitely not allowed to post the IEEE rendered version.

I extend your quote from your cited source:

"6. Personal Servers. Authors and/or their employers shall have the right to post the accepted version of IEEE-copyrighted articles on their own personal servers or the servers of their institutions or employers without permission from IEEE, provided that the posted version includes a prominently displayed IEEE copyright notice and, when published, a full citation to the original IEEE publication, including a link to the article abstract in IEEE Xplore. Authors shall not post the final, published versions of their papers."

Post reply on HN