Re: Special Issue on VCs

On 2017-08-03 12:16 PM, David Chadwick wrote:
...> With the new open access model, the researchers pay for the 
publication,
> usually out of their research grant, 

Unless they don't have a research grant. Then they pay $2,000.

This effectively locks out all the people who aren't in academic 
institutions, or large corporations, from contributing their research. 
This must be 99+% of the people in the world.

This will include the exclusion of people who have a health issue, or 
personal issue, or religious issue, or political issue, or financial 
issue, that prevents them from being in an institutional setting. Yet 
some of these people will have things they want to contribute. And 
perhaps it will be something that's important for the larger society 
to hear about.

With the rise of the Internet, these people now have the data they 
need to research with, in many cases. The "institutional support" 
model appears to assume they don't exist, or at least can be ignored.

I don't mean to say that you don't know this David; you probably do. 
And perhaps from your position from inside a university system, it 
still seems like the best place to publish about Verifiable Claims and 
Credentials work.

But to me this makes your Call For Papers glaringly ironic. I became 
involved in this group over a decade ago largely because of my 
experience being published in peer-reviewed journals as an outsider. 
What happened to me then didn't seem fair, or in the long term 
sustainable for society. Something else had to evolve. And perhaps 
Verifiable Claims is part of the solution.

But at least fifteen years ago I could publish for nothing. My 
complaint then was that I'd done ten years of work and not gotten paid 
for it -- but at least it went through peer review and got out into 
the world. But now, in what appears to be the ill-named "open access" 
they'd want me to pay $2,000 as well? No thanks.

And I wouldn't even have done the research, probably, if there had 
been this author-pay publishing model then. Or at least I wouldn't 
have put it through peer review. And peer review did improve it.

Anyway: rant over. Except, about the $2,000 and your Call For Papers:

I think it would be more useful if ten people on this list got 
together and invested $2,000 each, to pay a programmer $20,000, to do 
VC implementation of something that replaces the journal that you 
you're asking for the papers to be published in. ;-)

And I'd seriously be happy to be one of the investors, if and when the 
time for that arrives.  :-)

I think there's a need for this. I think that the only humans the 
publishing system really needs are the authors, the peer reviewers, 
and the readers. All the rest can be done by software, if the software 
can handle it. And perhaps the combination of blockchain and 
Verifiable Claims can.

For anyone interested, here's what I believe is a good article about 
how the science publishing industry evolved:

"Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad 
for science?"

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science

Warning: long read.


Steven








and then everyone can read the
> article free of charge. Organisations that have membership agreements
> with publishers usually get a waiver or discount on the publication fee.
> In the case of SCN, the website says the discount can be up to 100%.
> 
> $2000 may sound a lot but is slightly under the average. A good article
> on open access publication fees can be found by the University of
> Cambridge here
> 
> http://osc.cam.ac.uk/open-access/open-access-policies/paying-open-access/how-much-do-publishers-charge-open-access
> 
> Note that only one fee is payable regardless of the number of authors,
> and it usually the institution of the lead author that pays.
> 
> regards
> 
> David
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On 03/08/2017 18:35, Steven Rowat wrote:
>> On 2017-08-03 8:39 AM, David Chadwick wrote:
>>> Dear Group
>>>
>>> please find attached a call for papers on VCs and self-sovereignty.
>>>
>>> Please consider submitting a paper on your latest R&D work, so that we
>>> can show the world how well we are progressing
>>>
>>
>> Interesting, and seems like a good idea.
>>
>> Except...please correct me if I'm wrong, but on initial inspection of
>> that Journal, "Security and Communication Networks", published by
>> Hindawi, it appears that if an article is accepted, the author will pay
>> $2,000 to have it published, unless they have a waiver for being in low-
>> and moderate-income countries.
>>
>> https://www.hindawi.com/journals/scn/apc/
>>
>> Is this correct?
>>
>> Steven
>>
>>
> 
>

Received on Thursday, 3 August 2017 23:46:37 UTC