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

Tzafrir Cohen tzafrir at cohens.org.il
Mon Sep 5 12:01:29 BST 2016


On Thu, Sep 01, 2016 at 10:31:59PM +0200, Paul Boddie wrote:
> 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

This applies to the select few Elsevier publications that are
open-access. Indeed what most peaple have against Elsevier is that most
of their content is not open-access.

PLOS will typically charge you even more. E.g. if your article managed
to get published into PLOS ONE, you'd have to pay $1500[1]. This is
because it's their only source of funding: they are a respectable
open-access non-profit.

https://plos.org/publication-fees - even more for some of the others.

> 
> 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

Again, this is an open-access Elsevier publication. Not the typical
Elsevier publication.

-- 
Tzafrir Cohen         | tzafrir at jabber.org | VIM is
http://tzafrir.org.il |                    | a Mutt's
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