Re: Reply to Semantics Proceedings Inquiry

On Tue, 6 Feb 2018 03:14:35 +0100, Sarven Capadisli <info@csarven.ca> wrote:
> > * Who will pay for the APC for the OA articles?
> > APC is fully covered by Semantics.
> How much of each registration fee is essentially given to Elsevier?

> > 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.

I must commend SEMANTiCS for going Open Access -- I note that the
proceedings from 2017 at ACM are still not available from 
https://2017.semantics.cc/proceedings
so I don't know if they are Open Access or not.


$50/article is not particularly high APC cost, so I would not complain
about that. If we assume the article is made available for the next 20
years that is $2.50/year for hosting a PDF, metadata and respond to DOI
resolution.


I must say however that it's puzzling that you have gone with Elsevier, 
given their track record of working against author interests, charging
libraries extraordinary high fees, and lobbying against Open Access.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier#Criticism_and_controversies
lists a bit of history.

Myself and 16000 other researchers have signed
http://thecostofknowledge.com/ to boycott Elsevier, and would therefore
not be willing to submit or review for SEMANTiCS this year.


I will admit that things have changed for the better in recent years -
with more Open Access options -- however many of the Elsevier journals
charge APC of around $2000 to publish OA in a hybrid open/closed
journals which the libraries still pay fortunes (e.g. £1.5M/year) to
subscribe to. 


At least such an APC gives you a HTML rendering and hosting (no doubt
painstakingly re-assembled from the submitted PDFs) -- but that does not
seem to be the case with Procedia.

You get what you pay for - the $50 will apparantly only give
SEMANTiCS an ACM-like hosting of PDFs and DOI resolution, no
indexable/linkable HTML version - judging from previous issues:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/procedia-computer-science/issues

And I think that it is not acceptable for a conference which is trying
to cover Web Semantics, Linked Open Data and schema.org to specifically
disallow authors from using web, HTML and those technologies for
submitting their articles. HTML was invented 28 years
ago (before PDF!), I am not sure what we are waiting for..


Is there perhaps still a kind of cult belief that Computer Science
papers need to look the same way as in 1964 to be "academically
acceptable"? I certainly feel there is much more PDF/LaTeX worshipping
in CS than in other fields.  https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1002164 is
certainly a nice paper for its time - but that does not mean we have to
constantly try to replicate that style.


-- 
Stian Soiland-Reyes
The University of Manchester
http://www.esciencelab.org.uk/
http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9842-9718

Received on Tuesday, 6 February 2018 11:39:04 UTC