[Insight-developers] Re: [IGSTK-Developers] IEEE Elections & Open
Access
Stephen R. Aylward
aylward at unc.edu
Sun Sep 18 20:00:54 EDT 2005
Hi Ziv,
It would be very interesting to see some of the financials behind the
scenes of IEEE journals and open-access journals.
The numbers that I have are as follows:
1) Publication in IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging is not free for
authors. There is a suggested charge per page for authors - I believe
the suggested payment is currently $118 per page. That per-page charge
is mandatory for papers longer than 8 pages.
2) The Insight Journal was developed, up to this point, for free and is
being maintained for free - as are most open-source efforts on
sourceforge, freshmeat, etc. Julien Jomier and I have volunteered 100s
of hours for the effort. We work on it nights and weekends - like
tonight - we are both at work. There is no direct financial
compensation (we are not paid for this work - we do not have a grant for
this work), but I truly think (hope :) ) that there are non-monetary
benefits. Those non-monetary benefits are what drives most people to
contribute to open source efforts. I hope that the IJ will demonstrate
that the non-monetary "business" model of open-source will translate to
a successful open-access e-journal.
It is interesting to consider that reviewers and associate editors of
journals such as IEEE TMI aren't paid, yet it is largely the reviewers
that decide the quality of a journal - everyone is familiar with the
concept of trying for one journal and if the reviewers there don't
accept it, trying for a "lessor" journal. Open access journals have
the potential to benefit from the same (free labor) reviewers as the top
journals. Perhaps you can even argue that the IJ's reviewers will
actually receive some "benefit" - if the reviewers believe in the same
"business" model that motivates open-source contributions. The very
visible rating systems being used by the IJ for papers and reviewers is
meant to help us capture the best of the best.
Anyway, it would be interesting to see how the financials ultimately
work out. The open-source tools available today for e-journal
publication (dspace, insight-journal manager v1.0, php, pgsql, etc) have
greatly reduced the cost/time of ejournal setup and maintenance.
Now the challenge is public acceptance of and participation in
open-access journals. I am actually not too worried about that
challenge. If we do our (unpaid) jobs right, it'll succeed. If it
doesn't succeed for us, I am very confident that someone in the future
will succeed at it. There is clearly a place for paid journals too.
However, the value added / business model of paid journals is likely to
change. That discussion is for another night...I've got more IJ reviews
to write :)
Stephen
Associate Editor of IEEE TMI
Associate Editor of The Insight Journal
Constant Reviewer
Rarely an Author :)
PS> As an aside, Kitware does have a grant for the IJ, so some of Luis'
time is covered, but the extensions they are developing for the IJ are
still in Beta - and were only tested last week. What they are
developing is truly exciting, but nearly everying in the IJ, up until
last week, was from existing open-source efforts (e.g., dspace, php,
etc) and volunteer efforts (90% Julien Jomier).
Ziv Yaniv wrote:
> Hi Luis and all the rest,
>
> First of all I'll come clean and say in advance that I am all for
> *Open Access* (its already here), but:
>
> Publishing quality journals, even ejournals, requires money (I
> assume someone was paid to tell me that I forgot the page
> numbers in bibliography entry 5).
>
> In the current *Closed Access* model:
> a. Softcopies are usually available from the authors' web page, or by
> request.
> I've seen many web sites with the final IEEE journal
> version and a disclaimer stating that the paper is meant to further
> knowledge etc., I'm guessing this is illegal.
> b. Publishing doesn't cost the author (not counting over page
> limits).
>
> One version of the *Open Access* model I am aware of turns things
> around:
> a. Journal access is free.
> b. Author's pay for the publication costs, these are projected to
> be very high.
>
> If the IEEE will turn to this *Open Access* model, then I'd
> rather stay with the current model.
>
> I know that there are researchers (o.k., mostly young researchers)
> that don't have the money to pay for publications.
> From my experience and that of others I have very rarely
> had a problem acquiring a journal paper.
>
> To summarize, I believe *Open Access* is here de-facto, but I'm
> wary of what the official *Open Access* will bring with it.
> If on the other hand we get both free access and no additional
> publication costs, then sign me up.
>
> No Free Lunch?
> Ziv
>
> ---------- Original Message ----------------------------------
> From: Luis Ibanez <luis.ibanez at kitware.com>
> Date: Sat, 17 Sep 2005 18:52:51 -0400
>
>
>> IEEE is currently holding elections for its board.
>>
>>
>>IEEE so far has been hostile to the notion of Open Access Publications,
>>mainly because the organization get about half of its revenue from
>>subscriptions to journals. For example, IEEE was among the organizations
>>that lobbied against the new NIH rule that publications of NIH-funded
>>research should be made freely available in PubMed.
>>
>>
>>If you are a supporter of *Open Access* and an *IEEE member*, here is
>>your opportunity for making hear your opinion on this issue.
>>
>>
>>As you vote for the new members, you may want to take into account
>>their position with respect to the Open Access movement.
>>
>>
>>
>>You will find the full statements of the candidates at
>>
>> http://www.ieee.org
>>
>>
>>As a help, here is the summary of the statements from
>>presidential candidates with respect to Open Access, as
>>it appeared in "The Institute" this month:
>>
>>
>>1) James Tien:
>>
>> Sales of IEEE publications account for approximately
>> half of the IEEE revenue and therefore are not something
>> that the organization can unilaterally and easily abandon.
>> For example, total IEEE revenues reached US$ 247 million...
>>
>>
>>2) Gerald Peterson:
>>
>> suggested to look at the IEEE standards association's
>> corporate membership program that allowed free downloads
>> of its popular wireless networking suite of standards...
>> ... industry groups have decided that wide dissemination of
>> the new technologies took precedence over generating revenue...
>>
>>
>>3) Leah Jamieson:
>>
>> Pointed out that in a sense, papers are free. An author may post
>> his or her paper on a corporate Web site, where it would be available
>> for free to anyone. But the agglomeration and organization of all
>> IEEE articles through the IEEE Xplore document delivery system adds
>> value and is not free.
>>
>>
>>
>>In my humble opinion we can interpret these statements as:
>>
>>
>>1) James Tien: IEEE is first of all a business and we should take
>> care of making money instead of fulfilling the
>> mission of a technical society.
>>
>> with his opinion, IEEE will end up like the American Chemical
>> Society who opposed the creation of NIH Open Databases PubChem
>> because it was detrimental to a paid service that the society
>> provided:
>>
>> http://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/acs_pubchem.html
>>
>> as a response, Richard J. Roberts (Nobel Prize 1993) resigned
>> to his 20 years membership to the ACS and posted the following
>> open letter:
>>
>> https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/1977.html
>>
>> ACS (as well as IEEE) also oppossed Google initiative of
>> Scholar Google, that fine tunned the search engine for
>> searching technical and scientific literature.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>2) Geral Peterson: "If there is a will there is a way".
>> At least he recognizes that dissemination of
>> technical information is more important than
>> generating revenue, and that IEEE have done
>> so in some activities.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>3) Leah Jamieson: Dr. Jamieson seems to be is ill-informed
>> on the US copyright laws,
>>
>> http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html
>>
>> and most of importantly on the standard policy of
>> IEEE publicaitions of requiring copyright transfer
>> from the authors to the society as a requisite for
>> publishing in IEEE journals.
>>
>> http://www.ieee.org/about/documentation/copyright/cfrmlink.htm
>>
>> Progressive Open Access journals do not require
>> authors to transfer their copyright, they simply
>> obtain permission from them in order to disseminate
>> the document. The Creative Commons Attribution License
>> clearly demonstrates that other models are viable:
>>
>> http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>In any case,...
>>
>>
>>This is just to encourage you to take this factors into account when
>>you cast your ballot for IEEE board members. Just consider whether
>>IEEE is supposed to be a Corporation or a Technical Society.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> Luis
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>_______________________________________________
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>>IGSTK-Developers at public.kitware.com
>>http://public.kitware.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/igstk-developers
>>
>
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--
===========================================================
Dr. Stephen R. Aylward
Associate Professor of Radiology
Adjunct Associate Professor of Computer Science and Surgery
http://caddlab.rad.unc.edu
aylward at unc.edu
(919) 966-9695
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