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

[dave walden]

On 9/13/2020 9:39 PM, John Gilmore wrote:

dave walden wrote:

> And the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing would surely like to see submission of a an anecdote or a longer piece submitted to the peer review process
> 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?
>
> Dave replies:
Because I think having the history exist in an organized way in an 
archival journal is important.  My view of the IEEE situation is: (a) 
like many other professional societies, they are struggling to adjust 
and keep doing their good work as the business model has changed out 
from under them because of digital communication and free exchange of 
information that came with the Internet we helped develop, and (b) they 
are moving (having to move) toward open access, e.g., see the anecdotes 
and events & sightings departments at
  https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/tocresult.jsp?isnumber=9173848
If we want scholars who study or write our history in the future to have 
our valuable memories, I am guessing there is a better chance of them 
being found and studied in the Annals of the History of Computing (for 
example) than being found in the archives of this discussion group.  
Also, in my experience, the IEEE is pretty good about giving permission 
to reuse content residing behind the paywall.  I am currently involved 
in my second instance of publishing a book for which much of the content 
was originally published in the Annals; in the first instance the book 
is essentially sold at cost (of printing and Amazon's markup above my 
wholesale price -- no IEEE fee for reuse); the second book will be 
similarly sold I understand.  In a more commercial example, a 
significant amount of the content of the wonderful _ENIAC in Action_ 
book by Haigh et al. (MIT Press) was previously published in the Annals.

The journal of another organization of which I am a member, with a 
similar 40-year history and organized stable journal archive 
(http://tug.org/tugboat/contents.html), has open access for journal 
issues as soon as the next issue is published (so members who support 
the organization get some minor benefit of earlier access).  But this 
organization's publishing effort of essentially done by volunteers (who 
contributed *lots* of their time), and they have only one journal to 
produce.  (The IEEE Computer Society which produces the Annals has two 
dozen publications I believe.)

My plea is for more practitioners of computing to spend more of their 
time helping the save the history they witnessed or are witnessing in an 
organized accessible way.  So much good history is discussed on this 
list -- for instance the InterOp discussion. Vint noted it would be good 
for someone to write about that.  I hope someone does.  I suggested one 
way for that writing to be disseminated beyond this list.  More 
important is that the history be written and somehow disseminated.  
Maybe the discussions here are sufficient dissemination.

Dave