Don't restrict the flow of technical knowledge
In follow up to my recent blog posting Technical papers and Open Access Publishing, I call in IEEE to change its policy on access to technical papers. Here’s my story.
I’m a member of two IEEE societies that publish IEEE Transactions. While most of the papers are rather scholarly, I sometimes run across one that I’d like to summarize and provide a link for readers to download the original paper. That happened recently. Knowing that IEEE forbids third parties such as T&MW from posting IEEE copyrighted work (I can live with that), I contacted one of the paper’s authors asking if he would post his paper and I’ll link to it.
The author agreed to post his paper, but he’s not a member of that IEEE society and thus he had no way to download his own work. That in itself is inexcusable, but it gets worse.
“No problem,” I told the author. “I have access to your paper. I’ll download it and send it to you.” Simple enough, right?
Wrong. When I downloaded the PDF document, I received a customized version that included the words “Authorized licensed use limited to: Martin Rowe. Downloaded on [date and time removed] from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.”
I contacted someone at IEEE who told me that if I have a full copy of Adobe Acrobat (we do here at T&MW), I could remove those words from each page and then send the document to the author for posting. I’m still waiting to hear from the author if he agrees to that.
This is absurd. IEEE should be in the business of promoting technical knowledge, which advances technology that can improve lives and create jobs. Instead, it goes out of its way to restrict that flow.
the_bird commented:
generally all those publishers restrict the free flow of knowledge..unless you become their members , of course. I wonder what would the original founders of these institution such as the IEEE would think of the situation now where the org is more a profitable business , just see for youself.
the papers are on e format , they dont cost a cent to the IEEE since the authors made most of it . the cost of publishing the papers are very minimal. I think the reviewwers are also on a voloutary basis..so...
roger commented:
High quality publishing costs money. If you want the end result to be free to the user, then you need to find someone else to bear the cost. IEEE is a not-for-profit learned society, it's charges are far less than the commercial publishers and the surplus made on publishing is ploughed back into fulfilling its mission "Advancing Technology for Humanity".
copyleft commented:
nxt2impossible: Your point makes no sense. It's a PDF! Publishing and distributing is almost free!
I believe organisations like the IEEE are abused to let global corporations share among themselves while the rest is left out for "copyright reasons".
Gert Gremmen commented:
IEEE has become a big beast. Too big to maintain a passionate relation to technology. This Institution once was there to stimulate cooperation / harmonization between engineers in electrical technology, but is slowly changing in an organisation to promote itself.
---- commented:
Additional discussion of this post at www.techdirt.com/articles/20100127/0423477913.shtml
nxt2impossible commented:
I believe, all publication houses charges and restricts access to the full content of the paper. No publishing house (be it Science/Nature) would want to publish and distribute for free.
