Most white papers are written by professors and students who are supported by grants. These grants generally come from DARPA, the NSF, or other federal programs. All that money comes from the taxpayers.
Yet as a taxpayer, I still have to buy the papers from a journal. A journal that hasn't funded the research, but profits from it.
A) What a cushy gig, I wish I had invented a professional society
B) This is an issue worth far more of the easily drummed up internet outrage than most of the silly things we all get worked up about, yet it seems to fly under the radar most of the time
This is the most aggravating part of it for me (I'm a PhD student who has stuff in the ACM library); I'm paid for by the NSF, but my understanding is that the NSF does not require the papers to be freely available. I think there may be some countries/grants that do force open the publications they funded.
The problem is systemic, and will only be changed by direct, large-scale intervention. Fortunately, the US government is really well positioned to do that. If all the NSF funded papers went away tomorrow, you can bet IEEE and ACM would change. The question is whether the government will do this, but they haven't show all that much interest so far.
As another PhD student, I don't really get all of the rage. In practice, everything post-1997 is easily accessible, and if you're searching through CiteseerX you probably won't even notice the difference. I won't claim it's a great system, but there is observational equivalence with "free and unencumbered publication" modulo a 3" x 4" blurb of text on the lower-left of the first page of the document.
Except for a select few Springer-Verlag publications (mainly the more book-chapter-like ones).
When you are no longer a student, it will not be so easy. IEEE and ACM (at least) will charge you for articles, and without an IP address registered to your university, all you'll see is abstracts.
No, what I'm saying is that you can get exactly the same paper through CiteseerX, modulo the copyright (which is all that changes between the preprint and final).
Not to forget that IEEE/ACM also take a big cut out of every conference budget. In fact, the cut is significant enough that budgets are fudged (frequently at that, I suspect).
This drives up attendance fees, which are of course reimbursed from tax payer money...
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 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?
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?
There are different kinds of journals and so the costs and benefits can differ widely. Academic archival journals typically have volunteer editors whose salary is paid for by their employer rather than the publisher (usually a non-profit society such as ACM). These editors manage the peer-review and acceptance process. Once the papers have been accepted, they go into production and, depending upon the journal and its goals, they may be subject to simple editing for mark-up and obvious spelling/grammatical errors or they may be carefully edited to improve presentation, style, and content. Professional editing greatly enhances the quality and readability of every author's work. This is the traditional publications model used by professional societies. I have no idea what the relative costs are relative to a Wikipedia-style journal with a totally volunteer staff. What I do know is that the amount of human effort that goes into such a quality journal is significant and that no matter what the infrastructure is, someone has to put in that time, and their efforts should be compensated in some fashion.
I think it helps to distinguish different types of costs. If we're talking about general technical writing editing or assistance getting something latex-ified, that seems like the kind of thing that can be readily pushed back onto authors themselves. For example, the volunteer editor could easily tell an author: "the reviewers loved your work, but you need a technical editor to make this acceptable for publication: hire one, get it fixed up, and submit it in 2 weeks if you want it published". The same thing could be done for Latex help.
From an author's perspective, paying for a tech writer to help them edit would only need to be done if they're actually bad at writing, in which case it seems perfectly fair to have them spend a few hundred dollars paying a local editor to help get their work publishable. The net financial benefit to having another published paper on their CV is certainly worth far more than whatever a good tech writer would charge.
I think what you are suggesting here is already being done. I don't have much experience but from what I hear you are required to submit a "Camera Ready" copy of your submission after you have been excepted. That would mean a well formatted and edited work.
In addition, professionally edited journals frequently have feature/news stories and research highlights, which require staff to select relevant topics and to write and edit the articles. Also, journals can have advertisements for products or for open academic and faculty positions, which require curation and communication with the entities posting the products for sale or jobs for hire. These things require money in the form of paying staff.
Well, if those feature/news stories and research highlight articles can't economically stand on their own, then perhaps they're not a good use of resources and shouldn't be produced?
And if the advertisements aren't bringing in at least enough revenue to cover their own costs, then they shouldn't be included either.
Authors either work for free or pay for the privilege of publishing.
I don't know where you get this. IEEE/ACM may not be paying them, but they are sure as hell getting paid to write the papers that go in those journals.
Does it cost more money to produce than Wikipedia?
The difference being that there are only 4 or 5 people in the world capable of producing or verifying the articles that appear in scientific journal.
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 producing or verifying the articles that appear in scientific journal.
And academic journals generally don't pay them a damn thing.
> I don't know where you get this. IEEE/ACM may not be paying them, but they are sure as hell getting paid to write the papers that go in those journals.
I'd like to know where you get this. ACM is paying nobody for writing papers. (I've published in ACM journals and conferences, btw).
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.
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.
I wouldn't trust Apple to maintain an archive of peer-reviewed science for the next 100 years, which is what librarians aim to do. Institutional subscriptions are part of this picture: libraries receive all the publications of the journals they subscribe to and archive them.
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.
Physical Review Letters recently adopted a system where authors can pay a fee to have their submissions published under a Creative Commons license. The fee replaces journal subscription/paywall revenue.
Oh, sure, Springer will also let you publish "open access" articles. However, the publishing fee goes up from a few hundred dollars to a couple of thousand. Now find me a prof that will actually sacrifice his precious grant dollars for that.
how should we monetize publications so that the staff gets paid?
That's a toughie in general, but for scientific publications the model is obvious: They get paid with government money, the same money that pays for most of them now (and that also pays for most of the scientists and the studies).
But, of course, right now there are lots of middlemen: The government gives grants to researchers, who pass on a substantial fraction of said grants to their institutions, who fund institutional libraries, who buy subscriptions from the journal publishers, who pay the editors.
We could cut out some or all of those intermediaries, but the for-profit journal publishers -- as the first on the list to be disintermediated -- are not going quietly.
> 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.
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.
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?
Nature, however, provides a very unique academic service: they can give you a "no" within two weeks. This is light-speed in academic publishing. Most ACM conferences take 4 months to return an answer. Journals in other fields can take years.
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.
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 little bit more reasonable: authors typically have to sign over copyright, but they retain the right to post "author-prepared" versions of papers on their personal web sites, albeit with an ACM copyright blurb attached (most people ignore that requirement, though).
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?
"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."
"The original copyright holder retains: [...] The right to post author-prepared versions of the work covered by ACM copyright in a personal collection on their own Home Page and on a publicly accessible server of their employer, and in a repository legally mandated by the agency funding the research on which the Work is based. Such posting is limited to noncommercial access and personal use by others, and must include this notice both embedded within the full text file and in the accompanying citation display as well:
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].
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.
What's even worse is that the IEEE charges to read their standards. The ITU charges as well but the IETF thankfully does not.
All 3 organizations are effectively doing the same thing. Granted their standards focus on different areas. But why can the IETF manage this completely without charging while the others have to charge extortionate fees?
The IETF charges attendees $650 in meeting registration, and receives close to $1M/year in sponsorship from the Internet Society and industry (budgets on http://iaoc.ietf.org/). Free access to IETF standards is subsidised out of other fees...
Part of the problem is that the journals are part of a complicated infrastructure for judging academic quality. The best authors compete to get published in the best journals. The best journals are based on years or decades of reputation and history. You can't create de novo a system to replace this instantly. There is a chicken and egg problem to be solved before we have free publishing venues with a widely accepted reputation for only publishing the best papers.
Hint: I never had any problems obtaining a scientific paper by directly contacting its author. Many of the papers are directly downloadable from author's pages.
Matt mentions that in his write-up, but then mentions that the IEEE is changing its status of allowing uploads on author's pages:
Some time in January, the IEEE apparently quietly revised its copyright policy to explicitly forbid us authors from sharing the "final" versions of our papers on the web
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 ... last time I was there, I think there were 500+ academics in attendance. Despite corporate sponsors, there just isn't enough upfront cash (participant registration fees come in AFTER the venue is booked, for example) I can't see a way for academics to self-organize at this scale.
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.
Don'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.
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 personally aware of ANY scientific journals where authors or reviewers are paid by journals.
I'm not interested in getting paid for publishing. However, like most other scientists, I'm tired of having to jump through hoops to get access to research data and findings that we citizens collectively paid to produce.
This is all anecdotal of course. I'm not aware of any broader literature or even editorials describing what value, if any, is added by the current system.
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.")
Was it in one of the more "magazine-style" publications, like ACM Queue or CACM? I believe those have a more active editorial staff, as compared to stuff like ACM Transactions on Graphics, which requires authors to prepare a publication-ready PDF, with no ACM-provided editing or formatting assistance.
My only personal experience with editorial "assistance" is with an IEEE journal, which totally messed up one of my articles in a way I didn't notice until it had gotten published. They had moved the "related work" section to a sidebar inset, and since I'd read that section a million times I just assumed it was the same (in new location) and didn't read it closely again. Turns out they helpfully reorganized some of the references and discussion of them, so it no longer made much sense, and even had newly introduced grammatical errors.
I have published in ACM and IEEE conferences, as well as had an article in IEEE Computer. The experiences are very different. The conference paper was all us - formatting, editing, everything. The article in Computer we had multiple iterations with a professional editor whose job was to maintain a consistent "voice" throughout the publication.
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.
I wonder if it would be considered bad to block ieee/acm using the google chrome blocker plugin (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2218382). I geniunely don't want to see them in my results, but they're not quite a content farm.
Dear downvoter, in case it wasn't clear, the IEEE and ACM both have elected officials. I was suggesting he run for office within the IEEE or ACM, not for public office. Thanks.
Yet as a taxpayer, I still have to buy the papers from a journal. A journal that hasn't funded the research, but profits from it.
A) What a cushy gig, I wish I had invented a professional society
B) This is an issue worth far more of the easily drummed up internet outrage than most of the silly things we all get worked up about, yet it seems to fly under the radar most of the time