Publishing in certain journals (and conferences) is high-reputation, because everyone in some field or subfield believes they are. And thus, they all try to submit their papers to that journal, and thus that journal gets to pick the best papers, and thus that journal keeps a high reputation. Publishing work elsewhere is considered a lesser achievement, and work elsewhere is read with less regard. So, the reputation of high-status journals is notably stable.
On the other hand, almost every researcher in CS flaunts copyright, posting their papers on their own websites. The practice is so pervasive that when I want to find a specific paper, I usually search for the author’s website first, before I try accessing the journal—even thouggh I have the expensive university access to those journals. (Well, in CS they’re usually conference proceedings instead of journals, but that’s beside the point.)
In fact, author home pages are a vastly better mechanism for finding research than journals or conference proceedings are, because they can carry far more information. Authors will often have more up-to-date versions of their research than the journal version does. Sometimes they have code or interactive demos. Often they put their later, related work in the same place, which is oftern clearer or more useful.
Other fields could make this shift too, subfield by subfield and journal audience by journal audience. For this to happen cleanly, a significant fraction of the top researchers in a field need to get together and agree to break copyright in the same way. In any given subfield, they probably already go to the same conferences, so there’s plenty of opportunity to reach these agreements. One or two doing this alone would be prone to lawsuits from the publisher, but all at once would destroy their audience.
This may be a daunting risk for many academics, though, and it probably seems needlessly risky. And it is needlessly risky. It seems like it should be much easier to get that same roomful of academics to agree to move their shared regard from a closed-access journal to an open-access journal. Moreso, because there are already people building free journal-management software for exactly this purpose, this should be relatively easy to do.
Moving individual fields and subfields to totally-free, totally-open journals is, now, just a matter of memtic engineering. Convince enough people in any given field to switch, and make it easy for them to do so, and organize a little bit, and that switch can happen.
Academics, consider: what’s the global value of opening the journals of your specialty? Are you, or anyone you can speak to, in a position to do this?
Everyone else: is anyone good at memetic engineering, and willing to take this as a challenge?
almost every researcher in CS flaunts copyright, posting their papers on their own websites
Many journals explicitly allow you to distribute a “preprint” of your journal articles on your personal website. For example, the Elsevier policy states that authors retain:
the right to post a pre-print version of the journal article on Internet websites including electronic pre-print servers, and to retain indefinitely such version on such servers or sites for scholarly purposes
Publishing in certain journals (and conferences) is high-reputation, because everyone in some field or subfield believes they are. And thus, they all try to submit their papers to that journal, and thus that journal gets to pick the best papers, and thus that journal keeps a high reputation. Publishing work elsewhere is considered a lesser achievement, and work elsewhere is read with less regard. So, the reputation of high-status journals is notably stable.
On the other hand, almost every researcher in CS flaunts copyright, posting their papers on their own websites. The practice is so pervasive that when I want to find a specific paper, I usually search for the author’s website first, before I try accessing the journal—even thouggh I have the expensive university access to those journals. (Well, in CS they’re usually conference proceedings instead of journals, but that’s beside the point.)
In fact, author home pages are a vastly better mechanism for finding research than journals or conference proceedings are, because they can carry far more information. Authors will often have more up-to-date versions of their research than the journal version does. Sometimes they have code or interactive demos. Often they put their later, related work in the same place, which is oftern clearer or more useful.
Other fields could make this shift too, subfield by subfield and journal audience by journal audience. For this to happen cleanly, a significant fraction of the top researchers in a field need to get together and agree to break copyright in the same way. In any given subfield, they probably already go to the same conferences, so there’s plenty of opportunity to reach these agreements. One or two doing this alone would be prone to lawsuits from the publisher, but all at once would destroy their audience.
This may be a daunting risk for many academics, though, and it probably seems needlessly risky. And it is needlessly risky. It seems like it should be much easier to get that same roomful of academics to agree to move their shared regard from a closed-access journal to an open-access journal. Moreso, because there are already people building free journal-management software for exactly this purpose, this should be relatively easy to do.
Moving individual fields and subfields to totally-free, totally-open journals is, now, just a matter of memtic engineering. Convince enough people in any given field to switch, and make it easy for them to do so, and organize a little bit, and that switch can happen.
Academics, consider: what’s the global value of opening the journals of your specialty? Are you, or anyone you can speak to, in a position to do this?
Everyone else: is anyone good at memetic engineering, and willing to take this as a challenge?
Many journals explicitly allow you to distribute a “preprint” of your journal articles on your personal website. For example, the Elsevier policy states that authors retain:
You want “flout” here, not “flaunt”.