Comments on: WikiSym 2010

By: Jonathan Grudin

Jonathan Grudin — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 23:57:26 +0000

Perhaps so, although people could reuse part of it under fair use, and probably could reuse all of it — I have not heard of a case of ACM pursuing such issues , and I doubt they would unless it was e.g. published verbatim in a for-profit book, in which case they might ask the publisher to fork over a couple hundred bucks. If anyone knows of counterexamples I would love to hear about it. I am fine with people adopting legalistic positions, but much of the world doesn’t usually operate legalistically, it operates more through common sense and social conventions. Some publishers talk belligerently, particularly those with monopoly control over a field’s publications. Computer science isn’t like that, so relatively few of us are likely to be motivated by arguments such as these.

Are there examples of your papers reused by the Wikimedia community in this way? I’d be interested in seeing what it looks like. I interviewed acquisition librarians and tried to get a full view of this topic a few years ago. I published anarticle on the subject in an ACM journal, though it is freely available on my web site, http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/coet/Grudin/crossing.pdf.

By: Guillaume Paumier

Guillaume Paumier — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 04:20:01 +0000

Guillaume could have had his paper in WikiSym, put it on his web site where anyone could easily find it by search, linked to it from his blog, etc.

Yes, but I would still have had to transfer the copyright to the ACM, and I wouldn’t have been able to publish the paper under CC-by-sa on one of our wikis, where the Wikimedia community could reuse it or part of it. That was a no-go for me.

By: Jonathan Grudin

Jonathan Grudin — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 00:48:28 +0000

I understand the different perspectives on this. It helps to understand the larger context. There are for-profit publishers, which dominate the major literature in fields such as biomed, and much support for open publishing is a reaction to their practices. There are non-profit publishers such as university presses and professional organizations, such as ACM. ACM has a staff, but much of its activities policies are influenced or shaped by volunteers. ACM has handled things for computer scientists that they didn’t want to do themselves, such as coordinating the publishing side of journals and proceedings, and providing advance funding and guaranteeing contracts for large conferences. ACM long kept proceedings available for minimal cost by postal order prior to the digitual library, and the digital library is now site licenced by most research universities around the world. ACM permits authors to put their most recent version on their web site or their employers’, so they do not block free access to a paper. Guillaume could have had his paper in WikiSym, put it on his web site where anyone could easily find it by search, linked to it from his blog, etc. I have no problem with people who have any position on these issues, but they need to understand why it is that they are not likely to make as much headway with ACM augthors as they will with those reliant on for-profit publishers.

By: Dirk Riehle

Dirk Riehle — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 18:15:20 +0000

Most researchers require the credibility of the ACM DL to stand behind WikiSym or else their publication doesn’t count as much and they won’t get the travel funding, sadly enough.

WikiSym makes all papers from all years available on the WikiSym website for easy (and free) retrieval. This is covered under the ACM rules of non-commercial use of papers.

The ACM is actually “good” in comparison – it remains a difficult topic though; some more thoughts here: http://dirkriehle.com/2009/10/20/open-access-and-open-source/

By: Jérôme

Jérôme — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 13:00:46 +0000

This is an important that is bound to be raised for other conferences too. My advice would be to simply drop ACM and publish all papers online under an appropriate open license such as CC-BY-SA. Of course, the ACM and other publishers are invited to offer the possibility of CC-BY-SA publication, which we should accept and hope other conferences to follow.

By: Lex Slaghuis

Lex Slaghuis — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 12:28:47 +0000

Good post! I think still too much scientists do not realize that their publications are not accessible to general public, and more important practitioners.

Societal impact of research is becoming more important in The Netherlands and EU. Open Access is an important starting point of:
Improving this by cross over to the practitioners
Exploring the impact by measuring page views/ downloads, instead of only looking at citation scores.

One of the reasons I go to wikisym, is the access to the publications at the conference. But access during the whole year would allow me to improve my business during the whole year and encourage me more to contact researchers to provide data or testing opportunities.