- From: Christian Chiarcos <christian.chiarcos@web.de>
- Date: Tue, 14 May 2013 14:16:27 +0200
- To: Phillip Lord <phillip.lord@newcastle.ac.uk>
- Cc: beyond-the-pdf@googlegroups.com, Sarven Capadisli <info@csarven.ca>, Linking Open Data <public-lod@w3.org>, SW-forum <semantic-web@w3.org>
- Message-ID: <CAC1YGdiJMG847oSQVoPSs2NYTZu_RxXf7DwJyR-sbv-rMNRHhw@mail.gmail.com>
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: chiarcos@informatik.uni-frankfurt.de web: http://acoli.cs.uni-frankfurt.de tel: +49-(0)69-798-22463 fax: +49-(0)69-798-28931
Received on Tuesday, 14 May 2013 12:17:23 UTC