[Arm-netbook] New Open Access Journal for Open Source Hardware

[Paul Boddie]

On Thursday 1. September 2016 20.04.58 Mike Leimon wrote:
> Greetings all,
> 
> One of my friends brought this new open access journal to my attention this
> morning. Apparently, it is just starting up now and looking for an initial
> call for papers.
> 
> http://www.journals.elsevier.com/hardwarex/

It's interesting to know that Elsevier think it's worth "taking a punt" on 
something like this, even though they publish books and journals on anything 
and everything. It may help to get attention from a wider audience.

Personally, I have a low opinion of journal publishing, having seen the brand 
obsession that pervades academia: publish a good article in a suitable journal 
that random assessors of the described work don't already know and there's no 
recognition to be had; get in amongst the authors on an article about someone 
else's work that gets into a "brand name" journal and suddenly you did 
something worthwhile after all.

Combine that with "publication points" and other "productivity measures" 
introduced to academia to make it more like the world of business and the 
actual priorities of research and sharing knowledge take something of a back 
seat.

And there are the long-disliked aspects of the peer-review process, which in 
this case involve paying $500 to Elsevier ($100 special initial offer!) per 
submitted article and then presumably having your work reviewed by people who 
are doing the reviewing for free. The positive side of this is that the 
copyright of articles seems to be retained by the author - unlike a lot of 
journal publishing - and that the licences are mostly standard Creative 
Commons ones (CC-BY and CC-BY-NC-ND):

https://www.elsevier.com/about/company-information/policies/open-access-
licenses

https://www.elsevier.com/about/company-information/policies/copyright

Elsevier, of course, gets additional rights. How else would they make all that 
money?

http://theoryofcomputing.org/crisis.html

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/academic-publisher-elsevier-hit-with-
growing-boycott-1.1166665

> Ordinarily, I wouldn't have brought this up at all however, since it
> appears this is going to be an open access journal, I am thinking that it
> may in fact be handled in a manner that is compatible with the spirit and
> the goals of the EOMA-68 project. Given the readership of scholarly
> journals, an effort to get a publication about this new open hardware
> standard could result a lot of interest and adoption within the scientific
> community. Perhaps if that comes to fruition, we may see EOMA-68 cards
> adopted as components used within custom sensors or instrumentation.
> 
> Anyhow, I'd say looking into this may be worth at least a few minutes of
> time.

I don't disagree, despite what I wrote above, although I remain skeptical 
about the efficiency of such methods of informing and educating others. But I 
don't intend to tell anyone what to do with their time, and I appreciate you 
making us all aware of this.

Sorry to sound so negative above: it's a topic that can easily provoke a rant 
based on prior experiences and observations, especially in an academic 
context. I actually did contribute some articles to a genuine open access 
journal several years ago, and while I remain unconvinced of the effect those 
articles had, I did support the mission of that publication as a way of 
providing decent-quality material about the topic being covered.

Paul