Matt Blaze: How ACM and IEEE Shake Down Science

http://www.crypto.com/blog/copywrongs

by alterego • 15 years ago

240 64 15 years ago

drallison4• 15 years ago

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?

oiuyhtgyhuj3• 15 years ago

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.

drallison4• 15 years ago

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?

Lost_BiomedE• 15 years ago

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

jdp23• 15 years ago

> 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.

Anechoic• 15 years ago

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.

oiuyhtgyhuj3• 15 years ago

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.

MichaelSalib3• 15 years ago

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?

neutronicus• 15 years ago

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.

drallison4• 15 years ago

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.

bedris2• 15 years ago

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.

michael_dorfman• 15 years ago

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.

modeless• 15 years ago

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.

http://prl.aps.org/edannounce/CC-launch-press-release

bbb2• 15 years ago

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.

mechanical_fish• 15 years ago

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.

voracioush• 15 years ago

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.

logjam• 15 years ago

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.

metageek• 15 years ago

>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.

patio11• 15 years ago

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.")

ajb• 15 years ago

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.

smutticus• 15 years ago

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?

csperkins• 15 years ago

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...

krschultz• 15 years ago

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

Lewisham• 15 years ago

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.

larsberg2• 15 years ago

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).

eegilbert2• 15 years ago

The NSF has recently instituted a mandatory data-sharing policy reminiscent of the NIH. So, it's not unthinkable that they would do this.

waterlesscloud• 15 years ago

If Obama is serious about encouraging innovation, here's an easy way to do it.

Require that federally funded papers be publicly available at no charge.

bbb2• 15 years ago

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...

neilc2• 15 years ago

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).

gcb2• 15 years ago

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

rick_20472• 15 years ago

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?

hfinney• 15 years ago

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.

praptak• 15 years ago

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.

davidwparker• 15 years ago

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

anonymous2462• 15 years ago

I suggest he run for office on a platform of changing the policy. I'm sure he'll win.

anonymous2462• 15 years ago

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.

iqster• 15 years ago

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.

quag• 15 years ago

And yet, linux.conf.au managed to self-organize at this scale with a completely different set of organizers each year.

gritzko2• 15 years ago

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

bedris2• 15 years ago

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] http://publicaccess.nih.gov/

blahblahblah• 15 years ago

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.

edcrfv• 15 years ago

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.

Matt Blaze: How ACM and IEEE Shake Down Science

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