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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

#51

Post by rick_2047 »

gcb wrote: post #33
neilc wrote: post #24

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 li…

The tricky is to remember that an exact copy of the article can be called pre-published version by the author and nobody can say it isn't. and if you are very afraid, you can just remove or add one meaningless coma. that should get you covered. disclaimer: i'm not an IP lawyer. Also I do not subscribe to ancient extortion business models like ACM

I would certainly like a confirmation of this. If I remove a whole paragraph (like of acknowledgements or related research (which is already covered in the reference section)) does that mean that the paper is not owned by the journal? What if I make my own formatting and change the conclusion paragraph?

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

#52

Post by Lost_BiomedE »

oiuyhtgyhuj wrote: post #3
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…

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…

If that was true, I wonder if discreetly publishing the code online first, then submitting the paper would work.

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

#53

Post by neilc »

rick_2047 wrote: post #51
gcb wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tricky is to remember that an exact copy of the article can be called pre-published version by the author and nobody can say it isn't. and if you are very afraid, you can just remove or add one meaningless coma. that should get you covered. disclaimer: i'm not an IP lawyer. Also I do not subscribe to ancient extortion business models like ACM

I would certainly like a confirmation of this. If I remove a whole paragraph (like of acknowledgements or related research (which is already covered in the reference section)) does that mean that the paper is not owned by the journal? What if I make my own formatting and change the conclusion paragraph?

Per http://www.acm.org/publications/policies/copyright_policy#De...:

"As part of their retained rights, authors may revise their ACM-copyrighted work. If the new work is substantially developed, it is considered a new derivative work. The author owns the copyright in the new work and may do as she wishes with it. The author must incorporate a citation to the previous work with a notice ... If the work is a minor revision, copyright remains with ACM."

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

#54

Post by blahblahblah »

bedris wrote: post #32

The National Institutes of Health (NIH), which funds approximately one third of all biomedical research in the USA [1], requires that all peer-reviewed manuscripts that arise from NIH funds be submitted within 12 months of acceptance to a journal to a digital archive, PubMed Central, where the articles can be freely and publicly accessed [2]. [1] http://www.medpagetoday.com/PublicHealthPolicy/HealthPolicy/... [2] htt…

What NIH did for biomedical research is the solution that needs to implemented elsewhere. The funding agencies have all the power that is needed to change the behavior of the journals and professional societies. Virtually everyone involved in academic research relies upon grants to fund their projects and the federal government is, by far, the largest supplier of grant money for research. If open access publishing is required for grant recipients then the journals will be forced to adapt or die.

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

#55

Post by gritzko »

quag wrote: post #41
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.

FOSDEM is also a good example of how things could be organized.

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

#56

Post by gritzko »

patio11 wrote: post #29
logjam wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.")

It must have been some "popular" article. 99% of things I consume are classic hardcore CS papers in the classic LaTeX>PDF format. I don't see how somebody might edit such articles without being an expert in the field.

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

#57

Post by drallison »

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.

Even a $5/paper fee is too costly. On an average day I probably read 5 papers and browse another 5 papers. That means my research habit would cost $17,250. And that is too expensive for just casual reading.

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

#58

Post by edcrfv »

One major problem with ACM and IEEE is that they charge per paper.

I do believe there's a plan in IEEEthat lets you download 25 papers per month for a fee. I'm not sure abotu ACM.

I wish there were a subscription plan where you could pay some fixed amount and read unlimited number of papers, but I presume they'd be wary of people (especially students) sharing access to such accounts.

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

#59

Post by chalst »

streptomycin wrote: post #18
MichaelSalib wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know where you get this. From publishing an article in an IEEE journal? I mean, I did DARPA funded work in grad school and got it published in a journal. I understand very well that authors are generally paid. My point remains: they are not paid BY THE JOURNAL. From the journal's perspective, authors do not cost them anything. The difference being that there are only 4 or 5 people in the world capable of prod…

It's expensive to run a journal. PLoS isn't evil, but they still spend millions of dollars every year http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v441/n7096/full/441914a...

Other scholarly societies have very small overheads.

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

#60

Post by chalst »

metageek wrote: post #21
logjam wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are many conferences that deal with open access in the context of scholalrly publication. E.g.,

  http://www.lub.lu.se/ncsc/program.html
Peter Suber keeps a list:

  http://www.lub.lu.se/ncsc/program.html
Many library science journals are open access, e.g., Ariadne. Example article:

  http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue57/waaijers-et-al/
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