Re: Reply to Semantics Proceedings Inquiry

On 2018-02-05 23:29, Pellegrini Tassilo wrote:
> Dear Sarven!
> 
> 
> We take your inquiry seriously and would like to provide you with some
> background information that hopefully helps to clarify some issues.
> 


Hi Tassilo, I appreciate your time and attention. Thanks.


> On 2018-02-05 16:22, Sebastian Hellmann wrote:
>> SEMANTiCS’18 proceedings will be published as Open Access by Elsevier
>> Procedia Computer Science.
> 
> 
> * Can you provide a breakdown of the registration costs?
> 
> Not exactly. Semantics is a non-profit endeavour.
> The ticket prices are calculated to cover the fixed costs.
> No personell costs are included. Everybody involved in the organizing
> team is working for free (except for some experts we hire for marketing
> and sponsoring).
> It has been a Semantics policy ever since to keep ticket prices as low as
> possible. And compared to other conferences Semantics ticket prices are
> really moderate.
> 
> * Who will pay for the APC for the OA articles?
> 
> APC is fully covered by Semantics.


I'll cut to the chase:

How much of each registration fee is essentially given to Elsevier?


> * Will the publisher subtract the APC from already subscribing libraries?
> 
> Please teach me how this should work given that the proceedings will be
> open source anyway.


The best way I can help right now is to suggest to look into open access
and publisher double/triple.. dipping. Elsevier is notoriously known to
be great at this. Any librarian would be happy to discuss this further
with you.

> To give you some background on our decision to go with Elsevier:
> In previous years we have published the proceedings in the ACM Digital
> Library. ACM is closed source by default but an open access charging
> scheme exists on an individual basis and at pretty high cost ($ 250.-
> per article).
> This year we were offered to publish open access in the Elsevier Procedia
> Series at a fee of $ 50.- per article. We thought this was a reasonable
> offer also for the community given that Elsevier also takes care of all the
> overhead associated with editing, indexing, etc.


Do you mean they take care of "editing" so that the papers that you hand
over to them can be pushed through *their* publishing pipeline, look all
"academically acceptable" and in two dimensions and stuff?


If you are shopping around, you have plenty of options out there that
are considered to be more ethical for the scholarly community eg:

"Full Article Processing Charge (APC) Fee Waivers will be automatically
provided for all manuscript submissions to PeerJ and PeerJ Computer
Science started and submitted in February 2018."

https://peerj.com/blog/post/115284880081/peerj-section-editors/

Please note that I don't have a horse in this race - I don't work for
PeerJ or any "publisher". I haven't published with them either. That
just happened to be something in my radar, and figured it'd may be
useful given the context.

Have another:

https://www.itm-conferences.org/

We are literally not short on ethical OA journals:

https://doaj.org/

not to mention with no APC.


As for Elsevier, there are a number of no "deal" negotiations going
around with national institutions. Germany:

https://www.projekt-deal.de/about-deal/

"A current list of institutions that have cancelled their contracts with
Elsevier can be found here.":

https://www.projekt-deal.de/vertragskundigungen-elsevier-2017/

Basically German institutions say no thanks we are not going to renew
our contracts because your prices are absurd. Elsevier says okay will
give it to you for free any way until we "sort out" the deal.

Look into Finland, South Korea,.. soon France, Switzerland, Austria.

If you are already familiar, please don't mind the mention.


> * Why are contributors forced to communicate using print-centric medium
> as opposed to Web?
> 
> Who says that? As you can read in the CfP we have not yet provided the
> instructions
> for authors simply due to the fact that we are still in negotiation with
> Elesvier
> about the terms also including the option to republish the article
> elsewhere in any
> open format. So please stick to the facts. Scrutiny is fine but making
> up things is
> really not okay.


I'll do my best to explain based on what I've gathered:

* Some of the calls at
https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vQ0MvSsZ74j0KNWTlmD_euNLCKIigBCk_c6WWcXqlprPkVXyfpfAbFTNXb51Nx6YdMbkUttQgOiaCUY/pub
state "Proceedings should follow the guidelines of the Elsevier Procedia
Computer Science format."

*
https://www.elsevier.com/journals/procedia-computer-science/1877-0509/guide-for-authors
states "Files should be in both MS Word file (or Latex where applies)
and PDF format" .. "Please title your files in this order
conferenceacrynom_authorslastname.pdf.
Submit both the source file and the PDF to the Guest Editor." ..

That's how I've derived at "print-centric". Do you object to the idea
that would be the simplest explanation given the facts?

As for your supplemental negotiations with Elsevier to "republish the
article elsewhere", that's orthogonal to the requirement that Elsevier
sets on the original submission format!

We can pause on this point and have you resolve that negotiation first.
If you can fill us in on the outcome, that'd be great, we can continue
from there.

I'm curious to know to what extend will the "citable" version use
HTML/RDF? How about appropriate views working under different
browsers/devices? Any interactive possibilities?

> Sarven, we are deeply aware of the scientific publishing hegemony and are open for 
> constructive proposals to circumvent that and provide our community with a serious, 
> sustainable and academically acceptable alternative. 
> You are invited to do so ...

Happy to explore the possibilities with you if you can define what
constitutes "serious", "sustainable", and "academically acceptable".


> I hope I was able to clarify a few things.


I believe you have, thank you.

-Sarven
http://csarven.ca/#i

Received on Tuesday, 6 February 2018 02:15:00 UTC