Interesting People mailing list archives
Re: All online USENIX proceedings now free
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Thu, 13 Mar 2008 13:27:56 -0700
________________________________________ From: Rahul Tongia [tongia () cmu edu] Sent: Thursday, March 13, 2008 4:12 PM To: David Farber Subject: Re: [IP] All online USENIX proceedings now free Dave, Let's not forget IEEE and ACM are still vastly better (i.e., cheaper) than many journals not affiliated to professional societies, e.g. private (for-profit) ones. One "solution" is for authors to use amended copyright forms, e.g., through ScienceCommons, whereby they can self-publish on their own webpage. From what I gather, these are becoming more and more accepted by certain groups like IEEE/ACM. The conference or journal can still retain copyright, but dissemination gets helped. Of course, as Matt stated, its amazing that the authors and reviewers do all their work for free. That said, I've come across more and more "open access" journals where the publication cost is borne by the author, but access is free. I'm not sure where I stand on these. An IPers have insights or new ideas on their role and design? Rahul ************************************************************************ Rahul Tongia, Ph.D. Senior Systems Scientist Program in Computation, Organizations, and Society (COS) School of Computer Science (ISR) / Dept. of Engineering & Public Policy Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213 USA tel: 412-268-5619 fax: 412-268-2338 email: tongia () cmu edu http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rtongia David Farber wrote:
________________________________________ From: Matt Blaze [mab () crypto com] Sent: Thursday, March 13, 2008 1:03 PM To: David Farber Subject: All online USENIX proceedings now free I'm delighted to report that USENIX, probably the most important technical society at which I publish (and on whose board I serve), has taken a long- overdue lead toward openly disseminating scientific research. Effective immediately, all USENIX proceedings and papers will be freely available on the USENIX web site as soon as they are published. (Previously, most of the organization's proceedings required a member login for access for the first year after their publication.) The proceedings are available at: http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/ For years, many authors have made their papers available on their own web sites, but the practice is haphazard, non-archivial, and, remarkably, actively discouraged by the restrictive copyright policies of many journals and conferences. So USENIX's step is important both substantively and symbolically. It reinforces why scientific papers are published in the first place: not as a proprietary revenue source, but to advance the state of the art for the benefit of society as a whole. Unfortunately, other major technical societies that sponsor conferences and journals still cling to the antiquated notion, rooted in a rapidly- disappearing print-based publishing economy, that they naturally "own" the writings that volunteer authors, editors and reviewers produce. These organizations, which insist on copyright control as a condition of publication, argue that the sale of conference proceedings and journal subscriptions provides an essential revenue stream that subsidizes their other good works. But this income, however well it might be used, has evolved into an ill-gotten windfall. We write scientific papers first and last because we want them read. When papers were actually printed on paper it might have been reasonable to expect authors to donate the copyright in exchange for production and distribution. Today, of course, such a model seems at best quaintly out of touch with the needs of researchers and academics who can no longer tolerate the delay or expense of seeking out printed copies of documents they expect to find on the web. Organizations devoted to computing research should recognize this not- so-new reality better than anyone. It's time for ACM and IEEE to follow USENIX's leadership in making scientific papers freely available to all comers. Let's urge them to do so. Matt Blaze http://www.crypto.com/blog ------------------------------------------- Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/ Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
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- All online USENIX proceedings now free David Farber (Mar 13)
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- Re: All online USENIX proceedings now free David Farber (Mar 13)