IEEE: Pay $3000 and we'll remove your article's paywall.
theinstitute.ieee.org
IEEE: Pay $3000 and we'll remove your article's paywall.
1–10 of 41 posts
Re: IEEE: Pay $3000 and we'll remove your article's paywall.
#2they think scholars have enough money to do the research AND pay $3000 to have it openly published?
it's the beginning of the end of closed academic publishing models.
Re: IEEE: Pay $3000 and we'll remove your article's paywall.
#3This is very topical for me. I have been drafting a paper that I was hoping to submit to the IEEE. This "might" change my mind. I'm not sure yet. There are stipulations that you can publish your work on personal sites if you get permission from the organization and you include a copyright notice at the top.
Incidentally, they also have an optional but suggested charge for papers containing color diagrams and over-length papers. They say that an organization should include publication costs in their budget for the research and thus the fees are reasonable.
The author guidelines, are dozens of pages long and I only had a week to absorb them so correct me if I missed something.
Re: IEEE: Pay $3000 and we'll remove your article's paywall.
#4I have a counter-suggestion: pay $3000 to support one of the open access
journals (see The Directory of Open Access Journals
"http://www.doaj.org/doaj?func=home&uiLanguage=en for suggestions)
and they'll let you post as many articles as you want. (Of course, I believe
most of them will let you post for free, but by contributing articles and
money to open access journals, you get to stick it to IEEE twice).
Re: IEEE: Pay $3000 and we'll remove your article's paywall.
#5they think scholars have enough money to do the research AND pay $3000 to have it openly published? it's the beginning of the end of closed academic publishing models.
I certainly do not. It is usually enough of a challenge to cover "overpage" charges that publishers charge when an accepted article runs over the "standard" length (usually 8 pages for a standard or regular article). Often times, the "extra" pages are introduced by additional text required to satisfy reviewers. One time I was requested to convert an 8 page article submitted as a regular paper into a short paper format (4 page limit), while adding a significant amount of new content. The result? A 7 page article that ended up costing $575 to publish. We won't even talk about charges for colour figures, which can run into the thousands.
Of course the money spent on overpage charges could be better spent on graduate student stipends, equipment purchases and maintenance, software licensing, attending conferences, and other expenses incurred by an active research program.
Other open journals, while still expensive, charge significantly less than what the IEEE is proposing. The challenge for academics is that, at least for now, IEEE journals are well regarded, well cited and considered to be a prestigious venue for publication.
Re: IEEE: Pay $3000 and we'll remove your article's paywall.
#6they think scholars have enough money to do the research AND pay $3000 to have it openly published? it's the beginning of the end of closed academic publishing models.
The open access publishers like PLoS also have publication charges. The fact is that properly reviewed and edited journals do add value, producing journals costs money, and at some point, somebody has to pay.
Re: IEEE: Pay $3000 and we'll remove your article's paywall.
#7they think scholars have enough money to do the research AND pay $3000 to have it openly published? it's the beginning of the end of closed academic publishing models.
The open access publishers like PLoS also have publication charges. The fact is that properly reviewed and edited journals do add value, producing journals costs money, and at some point, somebody has to pay.
Somebody has to pay, but does everyone have to pay?
Re: IEEE: Pay $3000 and we'll remove your article's paywall.
#8From the website:
"Open access can coexist with traditional publishing. IEEE will continue to allow authors to post manuscripts of their articles accepted by IEEE journals on their own Web sites or those of their employers."
Hence, it would be perfectly fine for me to publish on IEEE journals. Basically, if you want to read one of my articles you just have to look for it using google scholar. Is it that difficult?
Re: IEEE: Pay $3000 and we'll remove your article's paywall.
#9It would have made more sense if it wasn't called a "processing fee". That implies they can justify the cost with specific work associated with making a paper available.
Re: IEEE: Pay $3000 and we'll remove your article's paywall.
#10It would have made more sense if it wasn't called a "processing fee". That implies they can justify the cost with specific work associated with making a paper available.
I would be happier if IEEE/ACM would typeset the damn articles. The International Conference of Software Engineering this year has hired a publishing company that have been sending manuscripts back for even the slightest failure to meet (their interpretation of) the ACM style guide.
I've gone through the process 4 or 5 times across multiple papers.
You can't charge $3000 for the benefit of putting a PDF on a website when you do absolutely nothing for the creation of it. If they did the typesetting themselves, I might (might) accept that there are some costs per article, but at this point it's obviously complete nonsense on similar old-world scales as the NYT's $41m pay wall. Putting PDFs up is a fixed cost, which, even amortized over the development of the site, is nowhere near $3000 per article over and above the revenue they are receiving from libraries and memberships.
We keep getting told that there are overheads in running a journal; that open-access can't work without significant investiture. I disagree. When all you are doing is facilitating communication (academics do essentially everything for free: write, typeset, review, accept/reject, organize conferences, and new things like storing source code and data for replicability like PROMISE or SIGMOD), you are just a middleman. All that's being provided at this point is "authority" because ACM/IEEE-stamped articles count towards tenure, and the rest don't (at least in CompSci).
This sort of thing is ripe for disruption: a competently written web app could annihilate the processes that are in place. The only problem is selling the authority. A company like Google or Microsoft Research taking to the right people and bringing them on-board for a rival publication/conference would do that (MSR are actually quite well-versed in doing conferences, the Foundations of Digital Games conference started with them, and that's now ACM for authority). I think most academics are totally fed up with the status quo, so I can't imagine that's all that hard, you just need the money to have a dedicated person to do all the "selling."