Re: IEEE Royalty

[David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

From: gnu () toad com
PTo: farber () central cis upenn edu (David Farber), gnu () toad com
Subject: Re: IEEE Royalty
Date: Sun, 18 Sep 94 15:21:22 -0700


I spoke with Andrew Odlyzko at Crypto '94 last month; he's been
studying online publication of scientific journals.  Many folks are
moving to online self-publication of referreed journals, because the
traditional publishers have a long history of soaking academics with
premium prices (as well as for many other good reasons, such as
turnaround time, searchability, and cost of storage).  Here's a brief
quote, out of context, from his paper, "Tragic loss or good riddance?
The impending demise of traditional scholarly journals", available in
condensed and long versions, by email from amo () research att com:


   "...good mathematics libraries spend well over $100,000 per year just
    for journal subscriptions, and the cost of staff and space is usually
    at least twice that.  Budgets that large are bound to be scrutinized
    for possible reductions."


See also
http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/DataSources/bySubject/Electronic_Journals.html


> Pam at Dollar Bill has told me that IEEE now charges a royalty of
> $1 per paper per student for including in a course pack a paper
> published by them!


With this move, IEEE is apparently trying to accelerate the move away
from publishing with them.  Or did they not realize that the same
professors who they are charging $1/student/paper are also the AUTHORS
of the papers?  They can take their `valuable' information elsewhere
in future.


It's always amazed me that authors of papers, who own the copyright in
the papers, would sign it away to somebody like IEEE or Springer-
Verlag.  I can see giving them the first serial rights, but not the
entire ownership!  IEEE practices this not only for conferences, but
also for standards documents, which are completely written by
volunteers.  Then these documents are sold, on paper, at high prices,
and the online versions that the volunteers have spent years passing
around on the Internet for editing are thrown away because the
copyright has been given away.


        John Gilmore