[finfet1]

IEEE and IEEE Explore have been actively going after professors and forcing them to take down links to their own papers. In the past, many professors hosted pdf's on their websites for their papers -- this has only stopped because IEEE has been forcing them off. Just wanted to add this for those who think professors have 'suddenly become stingy' -- no, they aren't - they were forced to.

[JadeNB]

Interestingly, it's gone the other way in mathematics. It used to be that lots of journals required authors to sign some sort of statement saying that they wouldn't post PDFs on their web pages. (I remember one professor who had a page essentially saying "Here's the PDFs. Sue me, Elsevier!" Unfortunately, I don't remember who it was) Eventually, I think in response to the massive, overwhelming popularity of the arXiv, which I think most mathematicians would choose over journals if forced to choose, the big publishers decided, slowly, piecemeal, and behind the times as always [0], to go with the times and stop fighting something that was going to happen anyway.

[0] With an exception for the AMS, which has always (as long as I have cared, and checked, anyway) had publication policies that are as author- and reader-friendly as one can probably expect in the real world.

[phw]

Citation needed. I have been hosting various IEEE papers on my websites for years and have never heard from IEEE.

My understanding is that CS publishers tolerate researchers hosting their own papers, but I'm very interested in evidence suggesting otherwise.

[cs2818]

Really? I haven't seen this happening yet. I still self-host copies of my publications. I'm not sure how I (or others in the same position) would respond to a request to remove them from IEEE.

[therobot24]

i haven't heard this, this is interesting any links with more info?

[finfet1]

Academia is probably keeping quiet since most of EE, CS, CE is heavily dependent on IEEE publications for reputation and career advancement and paper-reputation.

[nickpsecurity]

There would be complaints somewhere you can link to. I have a collection of over 15,000 papers. Many I got off of IEEE/ACM. However, many others I got by typing the name into Google and/or CiteSeerx to find same file. I still can usually get any file I think of and many are still on academics sites. Those are high-profile, too.

So, where's your evidence that IEEE can or is forcing PDF's off the net?