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

[Vint Cerf]

What about publishing as historical RFCS?

On Mon, Sep 14, 2020, 03:29 dave walden via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> 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
>
>
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