Tag: Publishing
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Open Review leads to better books
My book manuscript, Bit by Bit: Social Research in the Digital Age, is now in Open Review. That means that while the book manuscript goes through traditional peer review, I also posted it online for a parallel Open Review. During the Open Review everyone—not just traditional peer reviewers—can read the manuscript and help make it…
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If Reddit Really Regrets "Not Taking Stronger Action Sooner", What Will It Do in the Future?
[Editors note: The New York Times weighed in with “When the Web’s Chaos Takes an Ugly Turn“, which includes several quotes from Tufekci.] Reddit may be the most important Internet forum that you have never heard of. It has more than a billion page-views a month, originates many Internet memes, brilliantly exposes hoaxes, hosts commentary…
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Contract hacking and community organizing
I discussed community discontent with copyright terms of some scholarly publishers, and I proposed an economic analysis. Now let’s consider two other approaches. Contract hacking I have published quite a few scholarly papers, and with each one I am invited to sign a copyright form. This is a contract between author and publisher, which which…
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Modest Proposals for Academic Authors
In the scuffles over copyright policies on scholarly articles, what is the academic author to do? First, inform yourself. Find and read the copyright policy of the journals (or refereed conferences) to which you submit the articles describing research results. Find out the subscription price (dead-tree-edition or online) that the publisher charges individuals and institutions,…
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Copyright in Scholarly Publishing, 2012 Edition
I’ve heard a lot recently about copyright policies of scholarly journals. Over 9000 researchers signed a pledge to boycott Elsevier, on three grounds: (1) high prices for journal subscriptions, (2) bundling practices for institutional subscriptions; (3) lobbying regarding SOPA, PIPA, and the Research Works Act. Meanwhile, other organizations such as the ACM (scholarly/professional society for…
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IEEE blows it on the Security & Privacy copyright agreement
Last June, I wrote about the decision at the business meeting of IEEE Security & Privacy to adopt the USENIX copyright policy, wherein authors grant a right for the conference to publish the paper and warrant that they actually wrote it, but otherwise the work in question is unquestionably the property of the authors. As…
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ACM opens another hole in the paywall
Last month I wrote about Princeton University’s new open-access policy. In fact, Princeton’s policy just recognizes where many disciplines and many scholarly publishers were going already. Most of the important publication venues in Computer Science already have an open-access policy–that is, their standard author copyright contract permits an author to make copies of his or…
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Open Access to Scholarly Publications at Princeton
In its September 2011 meeting, the Faculty of Princeton University voted unanimously for a policy of open access to scholarly publications: “The members of the Faculty of Princeton University strive to make their publications openly accessible to the public. To that end, each Faculty member hereby grants to The Trustees of Princeton University a nonexclusive,…
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Tinkering with the IEEE and ACM copyright policies
It’s historically been the case that papers published in an IEEE or ACM conference or journal must have their copyrights assigned to the IEEE or ACM, respectively. Most of us were happy with this sort of arrangement, but the new IEEE policy seems to apply more restrictions on this process. Matt Blaze blogged about this…
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Federating the "big four" computer security conferences
Last year, I wrote a report about rebooting the CS publication process (Tinker post, full tech report; an abbreviated version has been accepted to appear as a Communications of the ACM viewpoint article). I talked about how we might handle four different classes of research papers (“top papers” which get in without incident, “bubble papers”…