

Matt Blaze: How ACM and IEEE Shake Down Science - alterego
http://www.crypto.com/blog/copywrongs

======
krschultz
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
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.

~~~
larsberg
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).

~~~
patrickyeon
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.

~~~
larsberg
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).

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drallison
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?

~~~
MichaelSalib
_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
_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.

~~~
MichaelSalib
_I don't know where you get this._

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.

~~~
streptomycin
It's expensive to run a journal. PLoS isn't evil, but they still spend
millions of dollars every year
[http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v441/n7096/full/441914a...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v441/n7096/full/441914a.html)

~~~
chalst
Other scholarly societies have very small overheads.

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neilc
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).

~~~
gcb
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_2047
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?

~~~
neilc
Per
[http://www.acm.org/publications/policies/copyright_policy#De...](http://www.acm.org/publications/policies/copyright_policy#Definitive):

"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."

~~~
adrianN
From the same site:

"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:

"© ACM, YYYY. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by
permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The
definitive version was published in PUBLICATION, {VOL#, ISS#, (DATE)}
<http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/nnnnnn.nnnnnn>

~~~
gcb
You own the paper. You can publish it on your personal site before X in "© acm
200x". It's not your fault they didn't choose to take interest in the paper
before that date...

------
bedris
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/...](http://www.medpagetoday.com/PublicHealthPolicy/HealthPolicy/1767)

[2] <http://publicaccess.nih.gov/>

~~~
blahblahblah
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.

------
smutticus
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
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...

------
hfinney
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
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
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_

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

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

------
edcrfv
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.

------
voracioush
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
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.

~~~
patio11
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.")

~~~
_delirium
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.

~~~
scott_s
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.

------
ajb
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.

------
anonymous246
I suggest he run for office on a platform of changing the policy. I'm sure
he'll win.

~~~
anonymous246
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.

