Re: Open Access publishing of Semantic Web research

Thanks Axel!

A couple of people were questioning what the status is for OA on ISWC, 
and indeed Daniel Schwabe (in copy) mentioned that he negotiated OA for 
ISWC indefinitely in 2006. It seems that many assumed that ISWC was 
still OA. However, recent years of ISWC have been pay-walled.

I checked through previous years of ISWC, and found the following:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1RU4rP5tg_IECE3KBeGdjbwCdcC0N0R5PYX2w9-Kv9gg/edit#gid=0

In summary, up to and including ISWC 2017 (with the exception of ISWC 
2004), SpringerLink offers free PDFs for all papers with subscription, 
making all but one ISWC prior to 2018 Diamond OA (I don't recall any 
author fees/APCs in this time).

 From ISWC 2018 on, most papers are paywalled on SpringerLink, and no 
preprints were published on the homepage (in some years prior, including 
ISWC 2017, they were). Only when authors have paid APCs, it seems, are 
ISWC 2018+ papers available as OA. Otherwise all other papers appear to 
be paywalled.

So if the analysis is correct, ISWC regressed from Diamond OA to Hybrid 
OA (OA only when authors pay) in 2018.

Best,
Aidan

On 2022-11-02 12:04, Axel Polleres wrote:
> Dear Aidan,
> 
> Congrats, great piece which I really enjoyed reading!
> 
> Two small remarks:
> 
> 1)
> FWIW, I would add one more point in "Journal pain-points"
> the strict deadlines in conference revieweing and - at least perceived - 
> less strict deadlines in journal reviews, community journals slower 
> overall in CS, compared to other communities. I have to admit that I 
> only have annectotal proof for this, it was mentioned I believe in a 
> panel on the issue with e.g. Moshe Vardi and Sweitze Roffel onboard at 
> FLOC in Vienna's summer of logic a couple of years ago.
> 
> I think this is an important factor across conferences and journal in a 
> confrerence-culture heavy community like ours.... could be added under 
> "Poor reviewer incentives:".
> 
> 2) While sthey're still exclusively publishing with Springer, I found 
> the 2-tier publishing model of BPM conference very interesting, where 
> papers can be accepted as full conference papers (in Springer's LNCS) or 
> in the "BPM Forum", see https://dblp.org/db/conf/bpm/index.html 
> <https://dblp.org/db/conf/bpm/index.html> for less mature papers 
> (published in Springers less prestigeous(?) "Lecture Notes in Business 
> Information Processing" series.
> This allows them to accept more papers, and would be combinable IMHO 
> with a journal model for the top tier papers.
> I find this model interesting to consider when re-thinking a mixed 
> journal/conference model and it would be interesting to explore routes 
> to combine with the VLDB model, or in other words would lend itself to a 
> *combination of Option1+Option2* as one.
> 
> 
> just my two cents,
> 
> Axel
> 
> 
> p.s.: also left this as comment on your blog, thanks again, also for the 
> great gathertown discussion with Claudia and yourself at ISWC!
> 
> --
> Prof. Dr. Axel Polleres
> Institute for Data, Process and Knowledge Management, WU Vienna
> url: http://www.polleres.net/ <http://www.polleres.net/>  twitter: 
> @AxelPolleres
> 
>> On 02.11.2022, at 05:16, Aidan Hogan <aidhog@gmail.com 
>> <mailto:aidhog@gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>> Hi everyone,
>>
>> Inspired by discussions at the ISWC Townhall, and previously at the 
>> JWS plenary call, I published a blog post here discussing the issues 
>> of Open Access publishing in the context of Semantic Web research:
>>
>> https://aidanhogan.com/blog/index.php/2022/10/27/publishing-research-semantic-web/ <https://aidanhogan.com/blog/index.php/2022/10/27/publishing-research-semantic-web/>
>>
>> Also adding in CC members of the SWSA task force set to look into this 
>> issue; as well as Uli and Claudia with whom we discussed this issue 
>> for ISWC 2022; Pascal and Krzysztof as EiC's of SWJ; as well as Jim, 
>> Zhixiong and Ying as EiCs of Data Intelligence. (Apologies; I know 
>> some of you are already on the list.)
>>
>> The post covers the context of the OA issue, why there is a push to 
>> move away from publishers like Elsevier (in particular) and Springer, 
>> different types of OA, advantages and disadvantages of different types 
>> of OA, precedents for conferences and journals in CS that have moved 
>> to (zero-fee) Diamond OA and (inexpensive) Gold OA, general issues 
>> relating to the conference vs. journal paradigm in CS, precedents of 
>> CS conferences that have moved partially towards a journal model, and 
>> a concrete proposal for how publishing research on the Semantic Web 
>> could potentially look in future (as some food for thought).
>>
>> I hope you might find the post interesting! And hopefully it's not too 
>> long (I wanted to cover the issue in a self-contained and fairly 
>> complete way for those also maybe new to the topic).
>>
>> Comments welcome!
>>
>> Best,
>> Aidan
>

Received on Thursday, 3 November 2022 00:32:33 UTC