Is science on sale this week?

[Sarven Capadisli]

Hi!

If we subscribe to science, free and open access to knowledge, what's
the purpose of the arrangement between conferences and publishers?

-Sarven
http://csarven.ca/#i

[Leon Derczynski]

Reliable dissemination.

CEUR-WS, ACL Anthology et al. do a valuable, critical job.

--
Leon R A Derczynski
Research Associate, NLP Group

Department of Computer Science
University of Sheffield
Regent Court, 211 Portobello
Sheffield S1 4DP, UK

+45 5157 4948
http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~leon/

[Alexander Garcia Castro]

conferences are important on their own. for instance, right now the
ISWC is an important conference regardless of the publisher of the
proceedings. if I wanted to get the 2012 proceedings I may have to pay
(http://www.springer.com/computer/ai/book/978-3-642-35172-3). do
publishers pay the ISWC organizers for the right to publish the
proceedings? I mean, as things are now the ISWC brings people to
springer, not the other way around.

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--
Alexander Garcia
http://www.alexandergarcia.name/
http://www.usefilm.com/photographer/75943.html
http://www.linkedin.com/in/alexgarciac

[Gannon Dick]

If the "game" is knowledge, then the coaches don't matter, only the players do - the size of the playing field and the number of players is constant [1,2]. 

Nonetheless, RDF and SKOS list processing implies non-negative dissociation constant [3].  If you integrate to an area outside the playing field where the coaches stand you see the (very small) effect - on the order of water pH (10e-7).  pH is something water never lacks, however and in effect, the players are exhibiting equal value to the coaching "teams" - either conference organizers or publishers, who are selling their own (quite imaginary) brilliance. 

--Gannon

[1] http://www.soccer-fans-info.com/soccer-field-layout.html

[2] http://www.sportsknowhow.com/football/field-dimensions/nfl-football-field-dimensions.html

[3] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-egov-ig/2013May/0018.html

---

From: Sarven Capadisli <in...@csarven.ca>
To: Linking Open Data <publi...@w3.org>; SW-forum <semant...@w3.org>; "beyond-...@googlegroups.com" <beyond-...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Monday, May 13, 2013 10:25 AM
Subject: Is science on sale this week?

[Leon Derczynski]

We, as content creators, are holding all the cards. This is worth bearing in mind when one has to deal with demands of e.g. "specialist" book editors - the publisher needs the content creator to survive, but the inverse is not so true these days.

[Gannon Dick]

We, as content creators, are holding all the cards. This is worth bearing in mind when one has to deal with demands of e.g. "specialist" book editors - the publisher needs the content creator to survive, but the inverse is not so true these days.

--
Leon R A Derczynski
Research Associate, NLP Group

Department of Computer Science
University of Sheffield
Regent Court, 211 Portobello
Sheffield S1 4DP, UK

+45 5157 4948
http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~leon/

I agree, with the proviso that creation can not be dissociated from content, but economic survival is optional*.
So, +1, by which I mean (approx.)
<plus>

   <rdf:first>1*exp(ln(6 + (28/100))</rdf:first>
   <rdf:rest><rdf:nill /></rdf:rest>
</plus>

[*] (Keppler's 2nd Law: A line joining a planet and the Sun sweeps out equal areas during equal intervals of time.) is not the same thing as " ... sweeps out equal areas during *consecutive* intervals of time.
--Gannon 

[Phillip Lord]

It's a badge of honour. It shows that you are doing something worthy,
and makes it more likely that someone will pay for you to go to the
conference.

Scientific publication ceased to be about communication years ago.

Phil

--
Phillip Lord, Phone: +44 (0) 191 222 7827
Lecturer in Bioinformatics, Email: philli...@newcastle.ac.uk
School of Computing Science, http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/phillip.lord
Room 914 Claremont Tower, skype: russet_apples
Newcastle University, twitter: phillord
NE1 7RU

[Phillip Lord]

ISWC and ESWC are a particular problem because they are both Springer. I
pulled my paper from publication last year, as they would not do an open
access option.

So, with the situation as it stands, I cannot publish any semantic web
research in either of these two conferences.

Phil

[Rowe, Matthew]

As authors of accepted papers, don't we have the right to disseminate our work as a pre-prints anyway? I just put mine online anyway, and always have done (and will do) for people to download and read.

Matthew

[Alexander Garcia Castro]

the question is simple. both, eswc and iswc are prominent conferences
because of a serious review process, a well structured set of
committees working hard at the time of organization... but most of
all, because we the community have accepted both conferences to be
important. this will not change. so my point is, are publishers
contributing with money, serious money, to the organization of the
conferences? how are they buying and how are we selling the
publication rights? If tomorrow there were no springer how much would
that affect the finances of eswc and iswc? substantially? why not
enforcing an open publication policy for iswc and eswc? why not
selling publication rights as a bidding process?

[Peter Murray-Rust]

On Tue, May 14, 2013 at 10:16 AM, Rowe, Matthew <m.r...@lancaster.ac.uk> wrote:

As authors of accepted papers, don't we have the right to disseminate our work as a pre-prints anyway? I just put mine online anyway, and always have done (and will do) for people to download and read.

Yes, you have the right. Unfortunately many publishers (including learned societies such as Am. Chem. Soc.) have a policy of refusing to publish the work formally.

In an ideal world we would all publish work when we decided it was the right time and use the "publication system" to formalize the archival/priority/peerReview/editing. Unfortunately the publication system is very seriously broken.

Scientific communication is valued less by many scientists than formal publication.

--
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069

[Phillip Lord]

Perhaps, although if you have given away your copyright, they could
remove this from you at any time, with no justification. And I don't
have the right to download your work, analyse it, and generate aggregate
data sets on the basis of this.

I published my paper in Future Internet. In the future, any papers that
get accepted to ESWC and ISWC will just go onto arXiv -- this is
assuming you can submit *without* agreeing to publish.

Phil

[Phillip Lord]

Dump Springer, and just publish the results on arXiv. If ESWC cannot
organise a conference at 800 Euro a pop, without cash from Springer,
then perhaps they should try getting a cheaper venue.

Better still, let's separate out the committees, the publication, and
the conference. The committees can look at papers, they can all be
published on arxiv. And people who want can go to the conference.

[Peter Murray-Rust]

On Tue, May 14, 2013 at 10:51 AM, Phillip Lord <philli...@newcastle.ac.uk> wrote:

Dump Springer, and just publish the results on arXiv. If ESWC cannot
organise a conference at 800 Euro a pop, without cash from Springer,
then perhaps they should try getting a cheaper venue.

Better still, let's separate out the committees, the publication, and
the conference. The committees can look at papers, they can all be
published on arxiv. And people who want can go to the conference.

Fully agreed.

How about the idea of "Open Conference", similar to (BOAI) Open Access, Open data, Open Source... That does not mean the conference does not cost money - but that the procedures and the results are Open.

And if Springer are serious about being an "Open Access" publisher they could then offer to run it as Open Conference.

 P.

[Leon Derczynski]

ACL has been doing this (open everything) for a long time, for conferences, workshops and journals, and it works very well, in a very simple format ( http://aclweb.org/anthology-new/ ) - if a similar initiative & body were to take this role for I/ESWC, it would be surely welcome. It also causes fewer indexing problems to automatic bibliographic systems (e.g. dblp, google scholar) than does arXiv.

Springer are charging astronomical fees to make things open, essentially reverting to a high-priced pay-to-publish model that we typically disregard as being a scam. The big publishers share the prestige heritage of well-recognised journals, but nothing more.

[Andrea Splendiani]

Hi,

Do you actually know that Springer is paying something ?
I don't think publishers pay, usually.

best,
Andrea

[Alexander Garcia Castro]

not sure if they pay. I know we do pay, and with current prices I
would expect conferences like ESWC and ISWC should be able to support
a more open policy. The ISWC2013 proceedings are not free of charge,
see http://www.springer.com/computer/ai/book/978-3-642-35172-3

this is my issue with the whole business model, we write for free, we
review for free, and then we pay to consume the content we generate.
in a time when content is king we are giving it away for free.

[rebholz/ebi]

Hi,

the decision for the publisher is usually separate from the other
decisions. Sometimes there are liasisons (see ISMB and J Bioinformatics)
and this leads to a discount for the participants (20% on the
publication fees).

Apart from the scientific work around a journal (gathering papers,
distributing to reviewers, reviewing, decision making) there is other
work: proof reading, layout issues and also marketing the journal.
Usually, acadmics are not so fond of this part of the work.

I am running a journal (JBMS). It has an author-pays model combined with
open access (including mining), has been setup by Biomed Central, which
is now owned by Springer. I find it a good setup, but have to admit
that defending the costs is not easy.
On the other side, authors expect that they get good visibility with
their paper (including being in a journal with a good reputation) and
this is not only the condition that the paper is available through an
open archive, i.e. the reputation (whatever this is) should go on top.

Conclusion: I stay away from any provocative statements about
publishers, but am curious to learn how to move this debate into
something tangible. Some kind of infrastructure would be great, but
somebody has to maintain it too.

Ciao,
D.

[Alexander Garcia Castro]

what if the journal is not well known, or known within a very
specific/small community and with a low or inexistent impact factor.
then, what is the added value? reputation is made by the community,
not entirely by the publisher. the core of the work, writing,

gathering papers, distributing to reviewers, reviewing, decision

making, is what makes reputation possible.

content is king, content rules in most businesses in the web; not in
academic publishing. we generate content, do most fo quality assurance
and sustain the whole ecosystem. then, as added value we get content
locked up in a pdf, and very often content for which we have to pay
(very generously).

[Marko Tkalcic]

Hi

as far as I know the conference organizers have to pay to springer for
the proceedings (i think it's around 30 eur per hardcopy or around 10
eur per e-Version)

marko

----------------------------------------------------------------------
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mailto:marko....@gmail.com
http://markotkalcic.wordpress.com
Skype : markotkalcic
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Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/markotkalcic
Google Scholar: http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=JQ2puysAAAAJ
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[Christian Chiarcos]

Dear all,

obviously, this is a heated discussion, and I usually wouldn't try to engage here because it's full of all kinds of pitfalls, but there certainly are some aspects that need clarification and maybe, I can contribute a little.
As for myself, I am a scientist and a founding member of the Open Linguistics Working Group of the OKFN, so I am in general very sympathetic to open publication models. Also, I've been editor for half a dozen proceeding publications in the last few years. At the same time, I happen to have some insight in the work of publishers because I have personal ties to people working at a publishing house.

(0) Selected personal experiences: Last year, we conducted a workshop on Linked Data in Linguistics. We tried to find a suitable channel for an open publication, but back then, technical issues with Ceur (that seem to be solved by now) prevented us from doing so. In the end, we went for a hybrid model: Publishing draft versions of the papers online (we made sure that we were allowed to do so), but having a commercial print publication of the final book. In this way, the core information is accessable to everyone, but all references, and all quotations should be made to the printed edition.

(1) I have no specific knowledge of contract details for ESWC and ISWC, but usually, little to no money flows between conference organizers and publishers. Some publishers will "pay" you with free samples, but some publishers will actually charge you for publishing your proceedings to cover their expenses (and this does not necessarily mean that you keep the copyright!). In my experience, Springer will not. But they can afford this only because they are selective. And this selection process is one aspect why commercial publications, in particular in established journals, or book series will be regarded as an indicator of quality for the foreseeable future.

(2) Given the way academia works nowadays, scientists must have an interest in being able to convince people from other disciplines from the quality of their work. These people will dominate commissions, and *they* will be reviewing your grant proposals, not your peers. (This is true at least for smaller fields like the SW world or Natural Language Processing.) And there are no objective means to convince them of your quality as a researcher and on the basis of what you actually have done and written, other indicators such as impact, dissemination, presentation of your publications are getting increasingly important. Having a printed book to present to a commission actually helps, in particular if it is from the "right" publisher (say, John Benjamins for discourse studies, de Gruyter for general linguistics, or Springer for mathematics), in the "right" series or in the "right" journal. This system is broke in many ways, true, but if you want to survive, that's what you have to do.

(3) Publication contracts clarify the rights of the publisher and the author/editor, and these are negotiable. As I remember from our Linked Data in Linguistics book, Springer contracts *explicitly* allow authors/editors to provide draft versions over the internet, and as this is fixed in the contract, they cannot withraw these rights without contract renegotiation. (I mentioned Springer, becaue other publishers I had business with before were less flexible in this regard.) If your publisher won't go with that, choose another one.

(4) One should probably ask someone from publication business for confirmation, but in my understanding, arxive.org serves as a *pre*print server, and if your contract gives you (or your contributors) the right to make private copies available online, there is no legal way from preventing you from publishing your draft papers there.

(5) An even better way than publishing drafts online would be to develop contracts explicitly stating that and how the copyright can be regained by the original author after a few years or for a certain amount of money. (Buying it back is always possible, but certain publishers will charge you several thousand bucks -- depending on the publisher and the type of publication, of course.) Many publishers already have open access models, so you can buy the right to let them distribute your work under an open license, basically you pay for their infrastructure.

(6) Commercial publishers provide some infrastructure. This includes long-term hosting and lecturing (although it is certainly true that lecturing quality has decreased in the last two decades, if a publisher offers this at all). So, publishers still provide an infrastructure from which you can benefit. On the one hand, they are still holding the "established" brands for publication series. But also, as large publishers do not depend on selling individual books, but rather packages to libraries (both electronic and printed), having your book in one of these packages means that they are automatically disseminated among participating institutions.

(7) Commercial publishers are struggling to survive given the marginalization of their traditional area of expertise, printed books. Whether this is something to be concerned or happy about is debatable, but it forces them to develop new business models, so open access models are being developed on their side, too. On the one hand this offers the advantage of using their infrastructure with the benefits mentioned above, on the other hand, this may be costly enterprise for the author. (Some costs would also arise if you maintain a publication server yourself, and one need to look in detail whether costs and benefits outweigh each other.) Although I would in principle support such solutions, at least if the results are eventually available under a truly open license like CC-BY, the trouble is that this shifts the financial burden of publishing and acquiring publications from libraries to the researcher. I don't know about other institutions, but in my university, I don't see any additional funds for creating open access publications.

(8) A better solution would be a free, community-maintained portal where researchers are allowed to publish for a minimal fee (or no fee at all). But there is no such thing as a free lunch, and long-term sustainability of this platform for the next, say, 100 years, needs to be secured *somehow*. So, it represents a considerable financial load. If we can come up with some funding models that shift the financial burden from the author to, say, sponsoring institutions or libraries, this would be a perfect world. Obviously, people are actively working towards this, and I would actively support that whereever I can, but at the moment, this is little more than a vision on the horizon. (But let me know if I'm wrong. I don't know too much about the financial future of existing open access platforms.)

Just my two (well, eight) cents ;) To sum it up: At the moment, the double-publication strategy of free drafts online plus commercial final publication (resp., open-access proceedings and commercial postproceedings) seems to offer the best of both worlds, and depending on your publisher and your contract, it should be possible to do so in a legally proper way already at the moment.

Best,
Christian

--

Christian Chiarcos
Applied Computational Linguistics
Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität Frankfurt a. M.
60054 Frankfurt am Main, Germany

office: Robert-Mayer-Str. 10, #401b
mail: chia...@informatik.uni-frankfurt.de
web: http://acoli.cs.uni-frankfurt.de
tel: +49-(0)69-798-22463
fax: +49-(0)69-798-28931

[Phillip Lord]

Christian Chiarcos <christian...@web.de> writes:
> (4) One should probably ask someone from publication business for
> confirmation, but in my understanding, arxive.org serves as a *pre*print
> server, and if your contract gives you (or your contributors) the right to
> make private copies available online, there is no legal way from preventing
> you from publishing your draft papers there.

arxiv.org is a "preprint" server because academics were worried that
this would count as prior publication, and then prevent them from
getting a publication in a tree-ware journal, thus loosing them academic
brownie points.

The contracts with publishers are often quite specific about what you
are allowed to do with their content (that you wrote), and talk about
"your personal website". This may, or may not, include arxiv.

> (8) A better solution would be a free, community-maintained portal where
> researchers are allowed to publish for a minimal fee (or no fee at all).
> But there is no such thing as a free lunch, and long-term sustainability of
> this platform for the next, say, 100 years, needs to be secured *somehow*.
> So, it represents a considerable financial load.

It's called arxiv, and it represents a load of $7 per paper. Publishers
do not offer long-term sustainability; it is the libraries that offer
this.

> Just my two (well, eight) cents ;) To sum it up: At the moment, the
> double-publication strategy of free drafts online plus commercial final
> publication (resp., open-access proceedings and commercial postproceedings)
> seems to offer the best of both worlds, and depending on your publisher and
> your contract, it should be possible to do so in a legally proper way
> already at the moment.

Deeply confused. What is the "best" we are getting from the commercial
postproceedings? And how does having two copies of every paper around
help?

Phil

[Phillip Lord]

rebholz/ebi <reb...@ebi.ac.uk> writes:
> Apart from the scientific work around a journal (gathering papers,
> distributing to reviewers, reviewing, decision making) there is other work:
> proof reading, layout issues and also marketing the journal. Usually,
> acadmics are not so fond of this part of the work.

If the journal disappears then it doesn't need marketing. Scientists are
more than fond of marketing their own work. Please see here

http://www.russet.org.uk/blog/2054

where I don't discuss this issue, but wanted to tell you about anyway.

Phil

[ProjectParadigm-ICT-Program]

There is NEVER going to be 100% free science and open access online publishing. The problem right now is business models. Adobe Software has just shown the new way to go a MONTHLY subscription rate for their Creativity Cloud.

Traditional science publishers whose key cash cow is the publishing in print of Proceedings of Official Conferences, Science Periodicals, Specialty Handbooks and Industry Reference Manuals e.g. will always be doing this and ALL these will never be free.

What is subject to change is the publications in the field of open access/citizen science and general access science publications.

We have come up with a business model that for intellectual property right reasons we cannot not yet reveal in this forum.

It will create a new ADDITIONAL field of science publishing that will co-exist, not replace the traditional field of science publishing.

And let there be no mistake about it, open access science publishing does NOT equate free ONLINE science publishing. Only part of it will be free. Some parts will require payment which pays for the cost of peer review and other costs that are involved of meeting quality criteria of scientific works to be published.

There are no shortcuts, the playing field is only going to be a bit more complex and unfortunately for investors in stock markets less attractive.

 

Milton Ponson
GSM: +297 747 8280
PO Box 1154, Oranjestad
Aruba, Dutch Caribbean
Project Paradigm: A structured approach to bringing the tools for sustainable development to all stakeholders worldwide by creating ICT tools for NGOs worldwide and: providing online access to web sites and repositories of data and information for sustainable development

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---

From: Sarven Capadisli <in...@csarven.ca>
To: Linking Open Data <publi...@w3.org>; SW-forum <semant...@w3.org>; "beyond-...@googlegroups.com" <beyond-...@googlegroups.com>

Sent: Monday, May 13, 2013 11:25 AM

Subject: Is science on sale this week?

[Daniel Schwabe]

All,
for the record, the ISWC series publishes its proceedings freely accessible on the Web outside Springer Link.
I personally negotiated this right with Springer when I chaired ISWC 2006.
This was negotiated for the whole series, not just that year.
This was backed by SWSA, who promotes the conference series, as they all agreed it would not make sense for a conference like ISWC not to have open, freely accessible proceedings online.
This has always been the case for the WWW conference series as well.

Cheers
Daniel
---
Daniel Schwabe Dept. de Informatica, PUC-Rio
Tel:+55-21-3527 1500 r. 4356 R. M. de S. Vicente, 225
Fax: +55-21-3527 1530 Rio de Janeiro, RJ 22453-900, Brasil
http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~dschwabe

[Alexander Garcia Castro]

Daniel, I may not be understainding this but it seems that ISWC2012
http://www.springer.com/computer/ai/book/978-3-642-35172-3 has a price
tag of 51.16 Euros.

[Pavel Klinov]

The key is "outside Springer Link". The ISWC 2012 (research) proceedings are freely available:

http://iswc2012.semanticweb.org/research-papers

Cheers,

Pavel

[Phillip Lord]

With no license data on them. Still, this is a good thing. All you need
to do now is to take them off Springer Link, so no one gets confused,
and we have a sensible conference publication system.

Phil