Re: Cost and access (Was Re: [ESWC 2015] First Call for Paper)

Let's work through the requirements and a plausible migration plan. We need:

1 persistent storage: it's hard to beat books for a feeling of persistence.
Contracts with trusted archival institutions can help but we might also
want some assurances that the protocols and formats will persist as well.
It would be possible to have a fallback contract with a conventional
publisher but it's hard to see what's in it for them if they have to paper
print everything or migrate to a new format when the Web loses way to
something else. Maybe it's more pragmatic to forgoe these assurances of
persistence and just hope that economic interests protect the valuable
stuff.

2 impact factor: i have the impression that conventional publishers have a
bit of a monopoly and and sudden disruption would be hard to engineer. How
do to get leading researchers to devote their work in some new crackpot
e-journal to the exclusion of other articles which will earn them more
points towards tenure and grants? Perhaps the answer is slowly build the
impact factor; perhaps it's some sort of revolution in the minds of
administrators and funders.

I work towards a network of actionable data just like the rest of you so I
don't want to discourage this conversation; I just want to focus it.
On Oct 3, 2014 12:12 PM, "Sarven Capadisli" <info@csarven.ca> wrote:

> On 2014-10-02 13:50, John Domingue wrote:
>
>> As well as being irritating, UK academics submitting to ESWC run the
>>> risk that their papers will not be open to REF submission; even if they
>>> are, we have to go to additional efforts to ensure they are green OA
>>> published. This is also true of ISWC which makes the semantic web a
>>> pretty unattractive area to do research in.
>>>
>>
>> for both ISWC and ESWC the PDFs are freely available e.g. see [1]
>>
>> John
>>
>> [1] http://2014.eswc-conferences.org/program/accepted-papers
>>
>
> It is great that some agreements between the conferences and the
> publishers allow open access e.g., [1].
>
> However, lets not forget that:
>
> 1) a good chunk of publicly funded research is produced and reviewed for
> "free", meanwhile:
>
> 2) the public still ends up paying for the research submissions i.e.,
> institutions pay their fees to subscribe to the periodicals from the
> publisher.
>
> So, not only are we working for free, we are paying again for the research
> that we've produced. And all meanwhile, insisting on making it easier and
> preferable by the publisher.
>
> Having said that, there is no need to pile on the publisher. After all,
> they have a business and the intuitions are willing to pay for their
> services and products. That's "okay".
>
> Many in the SW field are interested in discovering the research output at
> great precision, without having to go through the publisher, or having to
> use a common search engine to look for keywords endlessly for something
> mildly relevant. We are all in fact working towards that universal access
> of information - I think TimBL said a few things on that silly little
> topic. IMO, this is where it comes apparent that the level of openness
> that's offered by the publisher is superficial and archaic.
>
> The SW community can do much better by removing the unnecessary controls
> that are in place to control the flow of information. This is whereabouts
> we should wake up. :)
>
> -Sarven
> http://csarven.ca/#i
>
>