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

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

Received on Friday, 3 October 2014 10:08:05 UTC