I’m not particularly fond of the fact that the academic publishing industry makes money off of the (often) publicly funded research conducted, reviewed, and edited by academics. I believe I’ve said as much before.
Well, I thought I’d rant a bit once again, but I will be brief, as I am tired. I went digging for a few things in the ACM Digital Library, and then decided I’d poke through the IEEE library as well. Before I go on, I should mention that I’m an ACM student member; for $42 a year, I get full digital access to every publication the ACM has in it’s library (and that is a lot). I have full text search and unlimited download. Quite a deal, actually.
Now, the full text search is actually free to anyone who wants to search the library. Go ahead: try it now. See. Exciting. I then made my way over to the IEEE digital library, and I discover that I must be an IEEE member just to do a search of the archives! As a plebeian guest I was allowed to browse the tables of contents of journals and conference proceedings.
This is, I think, foul. Not being able to do a full text search to see if there is anything in the library I’d want to purchase (or become a member to access) is absolutely ridiculous. How the IEEE gets away with calling itself a scholarly society when they’re busy building walls around their scholarly content (no full text search! Even Amazon gives me that!) is insane. I’m sorry: I have no respect.
If you know someone on the IEEE board, poke them with a stick, and ask them if they’re aware what the web group is doing. It’s a load of horse pucky.
Too true. The whole idea of pay-per-view academic publishing is a crock. As you say, academics do most of editorial the work for free. What does the publisher provide? A pile of dead trees that nobody uses any more, and some walls to hinder dissemination of research. It is an surprise that the online and free Journal of Machine Learning Research ( http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/jmlr/ ) is the most respected journal in machine learning?
I think you would like SPARC ( http://www.arl.org/sparc/home/index.asp?page=0 )
[I tried to insert links but the HTML was stripped out]
Couldn’t agree more – it’s frightening just how much journals screw their customers over because (as in the case of our library) dropping the subscriptions often isn’t an option.
In case you didn’t know, we (kent) do subscribe to the IEEE – if you’re offsite you can access it via http://chain.kent.ac.uk/