Matt Blaze: How ACM and IEEE Shake Down Science
1–10 of 66 posts
Re: Matt Blaze: How ACM and IEEE Shake Down Science
#2Matt 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 information promotes the growth of human knowledge, then free it ought to be. The ACM an IEEE digital libraries have improved and simplified research in many ways. The fact that they are behind a paywall and available only to members (and some institutions) is a negative.
Many alternative venues for publication are appearing, for example, Arxiv, http://arxiv.org/. Google's Knol service is also a reasonable place for articles about new work. But they do not have the cachet of a peer-reviewed archival journal.
ACM and IEEE are membership organizations. Perhaps we need a grass roots effort to change the copyright policy to, say, one of the creative commons licenses and open the digital libraries and electronic journals to all comers.
On the other hand, a well run, professionally edited journal costs money to produce. In a world where content is free, how should we monetize publications so that the staff gets paid?
Re: Matt Blaze: How ACM and IEEE Shake Down Science
#3Matt 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…
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 exploited, the journal claiming it owns everything and I can't post it online and the various different international laws on software patents and publishing code that has anything to do with crypto/security - in theory I would spend a year talking to lawyers before publishing each paper.
Re: Matt Blaze: How ACM and IEEE Shake Down Science
#4Matt 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…
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 economy. Robert Laughlin's The Crime of Reason: And the Closing of the Scientific Mind makes the case that the two are antithetical. A free market requires that something be secret and not generally available to create an artificial shortage and pump the price.
Perhaps we need to rethink what constitutes intellectual property. What sort of an intellectual property policy would you propose to your university? Who should own ideas? Or should they be held in common? Will Mickey Mouse ever slip into the public domain?
Re: Matt Blaze: How ACM and IEEE Shake Down Science
#5Matt 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…
> ACM and IEEE are membership organizations. Perhaps we need a grass roots effort to change the copyright policy to, say, one of the creative commons licenses and open the digital libraries and electronic journals to all comers.
Sounds like a great idea, especially in conjunction with the boycott/strike Matt's proposing.
Re: Matt Blaze: How ACM and IEEE Shake Down Science
#6Matt 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 and the materials to publish hard copies.
If it were a case where the content producers were getting paid for their labor, I'd have a much easier time justifying the cost for papers and standards, but paying $50-$200 per PDF is a bit ridiculous.
Re: Matt Blaze: How ACM and IEEE Shake Down Science
#7Matt 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.
Does it cost more money to produce than Wikipedia?
As I understand it, editors generally work for free. Reviewers generally work for free. Authors either work for free or pay for the privilege of publishing. Heck, authors generally supply their work already typeset. So what exactly is the cost here? I mean, I'm sure that IEEE/ACM have a staff that is used to getting paid, but what value are they adding if all the skilled labor is done for free by the community and all the technical wrangling is done by authors themselves?
Re: Matt Blaze: How ACM and IEEE Shake Down Science
#8Don'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.
Re: Matt Blaze: How ACM and IEEE Shake Down Science
#9Matt 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…
Commercial publishers from Nature to those on the long tail are as bad or worse.
I think this point needs repeating. Let's remember that Knuth took the Journal of Algorithms from Elsevier to the ACM (where it was reborn as TALG) for this very reason. (Cf http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/joalet.pdf)
The ACM, to its credit, has avoided the extortionate fees charged by many of the commercial scientific journals.
Re: Matt Blaze: How ACM and IEEE Shake Down Science
#10Earlier 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…
I don't think Nature charging holds back progress - so long as I am also free(speech) to make the work available for free(beer).
Nature is paid to do two jobs.
1, Provide a copy of the paper on paper to sit in a library for 100s of years.
2, Certify that a paper has at least been written by somebody vaguely reputable and has been peer reviewed
Originally the first job was the main role, now with the internet the second is far more important. I am happy for my institution to pay for a paper copy of Nature in order that there is a universally recognised 'I am not a crank' stamp to put on my work. Think of it as an SSL-cert for my pages.
Yes I would like there to be a free open online web-of-trust for peer reviewed papers - but for now I have no objection to Nature doing that.
And I would much rather have a commercial publisher do it than have it mixed in with a professional body like IEEE/ACM/IOP who have a whole other set of agendas.