The Elsevier boycott one year on

http://gowers.wordpress.com/2013/01/28/the-elsevier-boycott-one-year-on/

by tokenadult • 13 years ago

105 60 13 years ago

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aswanson3• 13 years ago

I would like to see a similar effort directed towards the IEEE and Acm publishing associations. They both leech off of publicly funded research and impede scientific and technological progress with their myriad paywalls.

rokk88• 13 years ago

>off of

aswanson3• 13 years ago

Yeah. Mayhap 'from' would be a proper fealty to the god of english language parsimony, in substitution.

pcrh2• 13 years ago

"Off of" is one of my pet peeves as well. Unfortunately, its usage is legitimate, if sometimes unpopular.

"Off of used to be standard in English; the MWDEU starts off with a Shakespearean usage [1592] and continues with Pepys [1668] and Bunyan [1678]. In the last century, they show it used by Hemingway, Faulkner, and Harry Truman, among others. So if it is making a comeback, it’s no harbinger of linguistic doom, just a return to form."

http://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2012/07/31/on-off-of/

sushantsharma• 13 years ago

FWIW, ACM has something called ACM Authorizer that enables authors to post links to their papers so that others can read them without paying any charges to ACM.

http://www.acm.org/publications/acm-author-izer-service

seanmcdirmid2• 13 years ago

You can already post your articles yourself, the Authorizer just helps you plug into the DL bookkeeping. And what's the point? What value do we realy get from the Digital Library these days? Its a feature that requires critical mass to be useful, and the fact that it is exclusive means it will never have critical mass.

Check out the latest CACM article on the open access issue:

http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2013/2/160170-positioning-acm-...

I think the ACM is pretty much in denial at this point.

mHORxaq• 13 years ago

This is why there is http://articleak.allalla.com/

CamperBob22• 13 years ago

Also /r/scholar on Reddit. Some very helpful folks there.

scott_s2• 13 years ago

They are professional organizations, not just publishers. As professional organizations, their primary goal is to support their members and the betterment of the field. They may not always have paywalls; unlike Elsivier, their organization exists for purposes other than getting money from publications.

The co-chairs of the ACM Publishing Board recently wrote an editorial, "Positioning ACM for an Open Access Future": http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2013/2/160170-positioning-acm-...

It's not enough, but it's a start, and I'm hopeful. I am a member of both the ACM and IEEE, and I want both of these organizations to move to a fully open access model.

aswanson3• 13 years ago

If their primary goal is to support members and the betterment of their field, then why are they impeding the sharing of information amongst said members and the public at large, not only with recent research but legacy papers from the 80s? My guess is that the organizations have evolved into self-serving fat bureaucratic fiefdoms.

czr804• 13 years ago

Elsevier and other large publishers publish many journals on behalf of societies, so the distinction between the interests of professional organisations and publishers doesn't really work.

joelthelion• 13 years ago

>their primary goal is to support their members and the betterment of the field

Their primary goal is securing a nice remuneration for the members of their board.

I've been in this field for a long time and I want to see these organizations disappear. We don't need them (anymore).

femto• 13 years ago

IEEE and ACM are supposedly democratic organisations. The way to change them is from the inside: get a core group of members on-side, put candidates up for election and start building support among the membership.

Reading around, there's at least some movement on the open-access front in the IEEE. IEEE allows authors to pay a hefty up-front free to make their paper "open-access" [1] and one of the candidates in the last election has the words "open-access" in his statement [2].

[1] http://theinstitute.ieee.org/briefings/business/ieee-expands...

[2] http://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/election/2012candidates....

Edit: grammar

rayiner8• 13 years ago

This "free as in speech" == "free as in beer" shtick has become weird. When you're more fundamentalist than RMS it's time to step back and introspect.

clicks5• 13 years ago

Have you read Eben Moglen's writings per chance? Your thoughts?

If you haven't looked into his work, here's something (in line with topic) to get started on: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbcy_ZxXLl8 -- I'd be curious to hear your thoughts. It's 1 hour 11 minutes, but I promise every second is worth watching. Moglen is an excellent communicator.

Near 8 minutes in, he says this:

This is the introduction to the free software movement. This is the purpose of the free software movement. This is the aim not only of the free software movement, but of a large number of the other things we are doing that arise from the fact that the digital revolution means that knowledge no longer has a non-zero marginal cost, that when you have the first copy of any significant representation of knowledge – whatever the fixed cost of the production of that representation may have been – you have as many additional copies, everywhere, as you need, without any significant additional costs.

The non-zero marginal cost quality of all the things we digitize, which – in the society we are now building – is everything we value, because we digitize everything we can value, right down to how we fit in our jeans, right? In the world where we digitize everything of value and everything of value has been digitized, a moral question of significance arises: When you can provide to everybody everything that you value, at the cost of providing it to any one body, what is the morality of excluding people who cannot afford to pay?

If you could make as much bread, or have as many fishes, as you needed to feed everyone, at the cost of the first loaf and the first fish plus a button press, what would be the morality for charging more for loaves and fishes than the poorest person could afford to pay? It’s a difficult moral problem, explaining why you are excluding people from that which you yourself value highly and could provide to them for nothing.

The best way of solving this moral problem is not to acknowledge its existence, which is the current theory. The current theory in force takes the view that industrial society lived in a world of non-zero marginal cost for information – information and the ability to learn had to be embedded in analog things: books, recordings, objects that cost non-zero amounts of money to make, move, and sell. Therefore, it was inevitable that representations of things we value would have significant marginal costs. And in economies operating efficiently and competitively, – or for that matter, efficiently and non-competitively – there would still be some cost that somebody has to pay at the other end to receive each copy of something of meaning or value, unless there is somebody available to provide a subsidy. And since that was the 20th century reality, it was appropriate to have moral theory which regarded exclusion as an inevitable necessity.

The discussion, of course, was about scale. “Ought we to find ways to subsidize more knowledge for more people?”, and the United States became not merely the wealthiest and most powerful country, after the second world war, not merely the indispensable or inevitable country, it became the intellectually most attractive country because it heavily subsidized the availability of sophisticated knowledge to people who could make use of it, even people who came elsewhere from poorer societies, or who had not the money to pay. And after the second world war, in the G.I. Bill, the United States took a unique approach to the age-old problem of how to reduce social disorder after war time through the demobilization of a large number of young men trained to the efficient use of collective violence – a thing which is always worrisome to societies, and which typically produces repression movements post-war, as the society as a whole tries to get back its leverage over those young men – the G.I. Bill was a radical, and indeed productive approach to the problem, namely send everybody to as much education as they want to have, at the expense of the state which is grateful to them for risking their lives in its defense. A splendid system; on the basis of that, and the provision of tertiary and quaternary education to the talented elite of the world, the United Stated government built a special place for its society in the world, as throwing away fewer brains than its power and importance would otherwise have tended to indicate it would do.

But we are no longer talking about whether we can save people, identified as the elite of other societies, from the ignorance to which they might otherwise fall prey, through enlightened federal spending. We are talking about eliminating ignorance. We’re talking about addressing the great deprivation of knowledge of everything of use and utility and beauty from everybody, by building out the network across humanity, and allowing everybody to have the knowledge and the culture that they wish to obtain. And we’re talking about doing that because the alternative to doing that is the persistence of an immoral condition.

Please watch to see how he continues :)

rayiner8• 13 years ago

He loses me at "zero marginal cost." What is the here or there of the "marginal" part? "Zero marginal cost" is not the same as "zero cost." Since when do people have a right to receive things for their marginal cost? What difference does it make whether that marginal cost is zero or very small?

I love free software. But one of the things I love about the free software community is that it is self-sufficient. It respects that some people don't want to "share" so it shares amongst itself. RMS didn't copy the source code of some commercial compiler and "free it." He wrote his own. Miguel de Icaza didn't copy the source of CDE and put it on Pirate Bay and "free it." He started GNOME and wrote his own desktop.

I see the "free information" people as the antithesis of that. They don't just want to share what they create. They want to share what you create. And I see that as an impingement on freedom.

rnadna2• 13 years ago

Re "deprivation ... from everybody"...

I was told once that the typical paper in my field gets only two serious readers, beyond the reviewers. (The joke is that it gets only two, including three reviewers.)

Of course, it is impossible to know who has read a paper, and that may explain why I've never seen the number written down. Still, it's easy to count citations. In my field, strong papers get perhaps a dozen citations. My guess is that no more than a quarter of citations indicates a thorough reading, so we indeed get a readership that could be counted on one hand.

For an author, a big factor is page charges. A popular [society, noncommercial] journal that I use has a special deal for providing content to readers for free. It "only" costs 3K. At that rate, the one or two potential readers who lack a university subscription could just phone me and I could buy them a ticket to visit, where I could explain the work in person.

ScottBurson2• 13 years ago

I think you're mistaken about why the authors are doing this. It's not fundamentalism; they just don't like to see the effort they invest in writing and reviewing these papers go to enriching the publisher while they, the mathematicians and scientists, don't see a dime out of it.

Basically, the publishers have figured out a way to insert themselves as parasites into the system, based on the fact that many academics must publish or perish. They charge substantial rents and contribute little if any value. Mostly, they coordinate the peer reviews (for which they don't pay a dime) and handle the actual printing (of little value anymore).

It's very difficult for any individual actor in the system to opt out of using them. Untenured professors need to publish ("or perish", as they say); they are not in a position to take a stand on this issue. Libraries are disincented from cancelling individual journal subscriptions by clever bundling by the publishers.

I can understand why people wouldn't want to continue to be taken advantage of in this manner. I wouldn't either.

rayiner8• 13 years ago

The journals offer a service: branding and aggregation. There is nothing devious about it like you're implying (not any more devious than Google making money from aggregating other peoples' news articles). Your disagreement seems to be with the value of the service, and I think that's just a matter of you undervaluing branding and signaling. There are a lot of people who write a lot of tripe. Kooks, quacks, etc. Any of them can put their crap up on the internet (they're called blogs). What the journals offer is a branding that certain articles rise above a minimal level threshold of value, and a central point of accessing such articles.

Nobody is forced to use their service. Your point that untenured professors must "publish or perish" doesn't fully analyze the situation. Tenure committees have no intrinsic reason to favor these publishers. They care only to the extent that these publishers have the brand that signals to them and others: "hey, this author doesn't completely suck."

Now, the publishers largely inherited these brands, from back when publishing was a more involved process involving paper. But there is nothing nefarious keeping them in the system. Any open access publisher could rise up tomorrow and as long as they could develop the brand and signaling power they could take on the publishers. But regardless of anything else, branding, sorting, filtering, and signaling are things people want, even more than free and easy access to information. And the publishers stay in the loop because they offer those things.

shardling2• 13 years ago

Having read the article, this comment seems to come out of nowhere.

The content creators want their work to be free, and none of the stuff you're posting seems to touch on that.

czr804• 13 years ago

If that's all they wanted it would be easy - just post it on a blog. What they really want is access to the journal infrastructure - I'm reminded of the French newspapers who want Google to pay them for inclusion in Google news, on the basis that they produce the content.

tylerneylon• 13 years ago

I'd say the boycott has reached the point of crossing the chasm into adoption by mainstream users. There are still new people signing up all the time, but the pace is low.

A bottleneck to mainstream use is the lack of overlap between hackers/devs and people who are most influential in academic publishing, such as senior editors. To developers the question is: if editors want to post their articles on the web, why don't they just do that? To editors, the question is: how can I practically make my journal open access? There is a need for technology to assist in setting up open access journals.

Some people are working on solutions, but it's not obvious what that solution will ultimately look like. There is some trial and error happening, and I hope great progress is made while the problem has the attention of the community.

gnosis• 13 years ago

"There is a need for technology to assist in setting up open access journals."

I just hope they don't start hosting them on Facebook.

anonymouz• 13 years ago

"A bottleneck to mainstream use is the lack of overlap between hackers/devs and people who are most influential in academic publishing, such as senior editors. To developers the question is: if editors want to post their articles on the web, why don't they just do that? To editors, the question is: how can I practically make my journal open access? There is a need for technology to assist in setting up open access journals."

That seems pretty far-fetched. Lots of Open Access journals and preprint platforms exist, and there is no evidence that lack of a suitable software platform is a limitation. The problem is more one of those new outlets gaining sufficient reputation to be trusted by more people (and hiring comittees) and figuring out how they should sustain themselves financially.

With the more adventurous approaches the main problem is once again coming up with a model that is actually better and then convincing a whole scientific community to drop their current approach and make their careers depend on a new publishing model. Writing the software is easy by comparison.

jrochkind12• 13 years ago

> how can I practically make my journal open access? There is a need for technology to assist in setting up open access journals.

I would like some further clarification of why you believe this is true.

The tech to make a journal open access is no harder than the tech to have an online journal with a paywall.

Is the issue just that if you go with an existing commercial paywalled publisher, they supply you with tech staff to do it for you, but if you aren't bringing in any income you have to figure out how/who is going to do the tech yourself?

That seems potentially legit, but it's not purely a tech issue. There are plenty of open access journals publishing using open source tech -- from tech like OJS (designed for that purpose), to WordPress, to static HTML. I don't think any of the tech solutions produce _great_ UIs -- but then again neither do any of the paywalled UIs, the bar is pretty low, unfortunately. I don't think lack of existence of software is really a barrier.

"Who is going to set up and maintain this software if we don't have money to pay them, and our editors aren't techies" is probably a much bigger barrier. But what would be needed to solve that isn't just 'we need technology' -- it would be -- and geez, I can't believe I'm just thinking of this for the first time spurred by your comment (thanks!), a hosted 'software as service' solution, grant-funded, that provides centralized free (or very cheap) hosting to open access journals. Might be a business opportunity there, in fact.

rumberg• 13 years ago

Off-topic: I updated the sites' design to make it more readable: http://cl.ly/image/3l3M0E320S3m

The Elsevier boycott one year on

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