Re: Is science on sale this week?

Christian Chiarcos <christian.chiarcos@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

Received on Tuesday, 14 May 2013 12:47:47 UTC