Publishing in Academia is a scam. Nowadays everyone puts their papers also on arxiv.org so at least we can read each other's papers for free. While of course still paying the fees to these publishers who are doing nothing but messing up the PDF (I have to fight them to fix the mistakes they add every time a paper is published), while claiming to do a value-add, which happens to add value to nobody but their own pockets. It's a scam through and through.<p>Of course one has to examine why this system is still in place. And it's mostly to do with policies in universities, where certain journals/conferences are valued more, and changing that is hard, because e.g. Springer happens to own the name. So we all pay millions to Springer, for the use of this name (that we, together, made great, not Springer), and in return, they charge us the privilege of reading the papers that we reviewed, edited, and wrote. It's insane, but it can't be changed as long as universities refuse to change.<p>So the hard truth is, it's not Springer/IEEE/Nature/etc, it's ultimately, us.
Meta: the linked post is undated, but available on the Wayback Machine as early as November 2005, so a (2005) in the title is warranted and, in any case, this isn't new advice...
Thankfully there are a few amazing Diamond/Platinum open access journals popping up (that are often ‘arXiv overlay’, meaning they simply provide peer review services to arXiv-hosted papers). These journals are free to publish and free to read but still provide the useful categorisation/review/cataloguing services of traditional publications. Notably this includes a post-review DOI.<p>Relevant for the HN crowd is the Journal of Open Source Software: joss.theoj.org.<p>[I am an editor at JOSS]
The situation had not improved much for the 10-15 years at least after that post was authored (which is when I was actively publishing).<p>But - writers could, then, and can now, use the "standard trick" to get past IEEE copyright transfer requirements:<p><a href="https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/119002/7319" rel="nofollow">https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/119002/7319</a><p>that works for a person who actually holds copyrights and can trasfer them - so that IEEE gets its papers, and eventually the author regains the right to also publish, modify, distribute etc. their paper.<p>For public domain it could be a bit trickier, and would require looking at the text of the current IEEE forms. I would guess that an appropriate loophole can be found to achieve a similar result.
Not only is that link really old, the IEEE has their own preprint server now, TechRxiv:<p><a href="https://innovate.ieee.org/techrxiv_launch/" rel="nofollow">https://innovate.ieee.org/techrxiv_launch/</a><p>Everybody should use preprint servers, and TechRxiv deserves more love and attention than it gets.
2005<p>Discussed in 2011: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3051014">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3051014</a>
As someone who published multiple papers during his academic days under auspices of ACM, USENIX and IEEE, I never saw a case where they demanded that authors not host a copy of the paper for themselves for their "own" audience on their own website.<p>Furthermore, the concept of a "public domain" paper in academia just seems weird to me. the concept of "public domain" means that the contents can be reused in whole or in part without attribution of any sorts to the original author(s). that goes against the ethos of academia (i.e. plagiarism) in regards to authoring papers, so unsure what public domain for the actual paper gives users vs. the document being what I'd refer to as "freely available" (i.e. no one else can charge for access to the document, only the 'copyright' holder can).<p>If the author has a right to freely distribute the document (and anyone who gets the document from the author maintains the same right), I don't see what public domain "assignment" gains anyone. i.e. copyright assignment (to the publisher) with the ability to freely distribute the paper accomplishes all these goals. The only thing (I can imagine) that it doesn't accomplish is giving others the ability to collect a bunch of papers together and sell it for "profit". But that doesn't seem to be a something DJB views as needed (and in fact, rails against the publishers who are requesting the copyright assignment for that very purpose).
What we need is:<p>1. make science self-publishing using decentralised protocols the default
2. redefine traditional journals and publishers as curators or labellers on top of the network, instead of owners
I tend to think of science as a distributed consensus process, and that peer review is analogous to a proof of work, and publishers are gatekeeping the distribution of proof of work. I think this is a useful analogy because one can subtract (in theory) the gatekeeping entirely: distributing proof of work is required for the distributed consensus to update.<p>However, and, crucially, journals differ in their effect on the consensus, e.g. IEEE or PNAS have much higher impact factors, and the competition both among researchers and institutions creates a market opportunity for gatekeeping, that naturally sorts those same researchers and institutions for the next ground of grants.<p>Again, I think it's hard to understand what a fix would look like, if we don't first recognize how distributed consensus should work for science. Algos like Paxos require a leader, and editorial boards for journals are effectively leaders.
in german law it's even impossible to transfer copyright (Urheberrecht). There is but one way: inheriting. What can be transferred though is usage right - licensing.
But publishing a public domain paper with a commercial publisher still makes little sense, unless the paper is also _open access_, for without the latter, the public domain document could still be put behind a pay wall. Just because it is owned by no-body does not create a duty for the publisher to open their paywall (unlike, for instance, the viral clauses of software licenses like FSF's GPL, which include language that actually forces sharing).