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

[Paul Boddie]

On Monday 5. September 2016 13.01.29 Tzafrir Cohen wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 01, 2016 at 10:31:59PM +0200, Paul Boddie wrote:
> > 
> > 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.

Indeed.

> 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.

Yes, which unfortunately gives an excuse for various factions in universities 
to remain against open access because they can point at the costs and ask who 
will pay those fees. Meanwhile, the costs of other forms of publication are 
not questioned. The brand reputation of non-open-access journals is also 
brought to bear in such arguments.

But open access journals do need to be sustainable, certainly, and that does 
need to involve money coming from somewhere.

> > 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.

Indeed. I did read those articles when I first came across them some years 
ago, otherwise I wouldn't have mentioned them. But my remarks are more about 
Elsevier than any specific journal.

If people think the referenced journal is a good channel to communicate open 
hardware things, they should follow their instinct and not let me stop them.

Paul

P.S. Does it matter what the larger publishing organisation does? I had one 
experience of being at a conference about text-mining where a representative 
for a big-name academic publisher said that they were going to have an API for 
their articles that would only provide a jumbled bag of words (and maybe only 
some of the words). They seemed to think this was a generous offer to the 
audience, many of whom probably wanted to do semantic analysis on the text. 
You can imagine what the reaction was. All because the matter of being the 
gatekeeper was more important than the knowledge being shared.