[ih] Karl's post from Friday: Re: Interop as part of Internet History

[Brian E Carpenter]

On 14-Sep-20 13:39, John Gilmore via Internet-history wrote:
> dave walden wrote:
>> And the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing would surely like to see submission of a an anecdote (see https://annals-extras.org/anecdotes/ and https://annals-extras.org/anecdotes/writing/ ) or a longer piece submitted to the peer review process ( see https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/an and https://www.computer.org/publications/author-resources/peer-review/magazines )
> 
> Why would any veteran of the early Internet ever submit their historical
> reminisces to a group that locks the information up behind a paywall for
> its own profit?

I'll treat that as a non-rhetorical question, because there are quite a
few reasons, unfortunately:

1) Reputation. The "Annals" is a very reputable journal with a strong
peer-review process. I'm not aware of competitor in the open-access
world for this specialization.

2) Tenure. That's a direct consequence of 1). Any academic will go for
an A-grade publication because that's what tenure committees want. (And
not only in US universities.)

3) Archival. Open-access journals, especially those without a major
institutional backer, already have a sad record of closing down and
vanishing. This has got to the point that the Internet Archive is
now looking at doing formal deals with some of them. This is not a
trivial issue:
"... 176 digital open-access journals have vanished from the internet
over the past two decades."
https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/10/open_access_journal/

4) Cost. Typically an author has to fund page charges to publish in
an open-access journal. Some universities are willing to fund this,
but not all. Whereas all universities already pay for access to
A-grade journals.

BTW it doesn't much matter whether you consider non-profits like
the IEEE or the ACM, or the for-profit publishers like Springer
or Elsevier. They all act much the same.

So what's an author to do? Well, at least the non-profits don't
forbid you to post the preprint version. Hence things like
https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~brian/FirstCiNZ.pdf. But that
only lasts until the University drops my web site. The IEEE
version will be around indefinitely.

Effectively, the bar to creating an open-access "Journal of
the History of the Internet" is quite high, because you have to
knock off problems 1) through 4).

It would be a wonderful thing to do, however.

    Brian

> 
> Click through Dave's links above to notice "Log in to access my
> content"!!!  They'll require you to assign your copyright to them, too,
> but the "invitation to write for them" doesn't tell you that.
> 
> Don't feed the IEEE or the ACM that bites you.
> 
> Don't volunteer for their program committees or to be an editor, author
> or reviewer.  They suck and you shouldn't suck.  Put your energy and
> your time into something that feeds your community, not parasitizes it.
> Those orgs always have the option to make their information free -- they
> make a deliberate choice every day to lock it up.
> 
> Part of what made the Internet successful (besides Interop!) was that
> anybody could download, read, share, spread -- and implement -- the
> specs for the protocols that it ran on.  Without subscriptions,
> payments, royalties, copyrights, patents, transcribing things manually
> from printed paper, etc.  Freedom.  What a concept.  Could catch on!
> 
> I actually did order a few IEEE standards (through their commercial
> provider, what was it called?  Global Technical Information?), because I
> had to implement them for a job.  They cost like $50 for a 20-page
> pamphlet, took weeks to get, and were written to be incomprehensible.
> Whereas the RFCs were open, accessible, and (in the early days with Jon
> Postel editing) written to be understood.
> 
> If someone from this list would like to start an open-access academic
> journal that covers the same subject matter, I would be very happy to
> recommend you to a likely source of startup funding for it.  The best
> way to destroy bloodsucking copyright monopolies is to out-compete them.
> 
> 	John Gilmore
> 	
> PS: Carl Malamud's Public.Resource.org is currently in federal court,
> defending itself (with EFF.org's help) to be able to publish copies of
> copyrighted standards, like building codes, that have become required by
> incorporation into state law.  The standards orgs think they can have it
> both ways -- they write the rules that everyone is required by law to
> follow, but you can't read them unless you pay their monopoly price for
> the privilege!  That team just won a Supreme Court case in April,
> affirming that states can't copyright their laws (Georgia tried).
> Support either or both orgs if you value open societies and oppose
> secret laws and proprietary standards.  See:
> 
>   https://law.resource.org/
>   https://www.eff.org/cases/publicresource-freeingthelaw
>   https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/04/supreme-court-affirms-no-one-owns-law
>