Re: Gowers petition against Elsevier

[David Chemouil <David.Chemouil@onera.fr>]

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Dear colleagues,


although this petition may be useful, I think there is much more to be 
done here.

For the time being, it is quite difficult to boycott any commercial 
publisher unless you are an experienced sommité in your domain. For 
instance, PhD students need to publish in highly-rated journals or 
conferences, which are almost always associated to a publisher like 
Elsevier or Springer. To fight this situation, and as in the case of the 
free software movement, the best strategy is in my view to develop a 
high-quality alternative to commercial scientific publishing. For 
instance, the said sommités could join (or create) programme and editing 
committees of journals and conferences publishing only under a 
totally-open access scheme (i.e gratis for authors and readers, as well 
as under a "free" licence, such as the Creative Commons - Attribution - 
Share-Alike licence). As a matter of fact, as most know, this is already 
the case with publications such as TAC or LMCS and with conferences 
relying on the EPTCS proceedings. Besides, it is easy to setup a site as 
an ArXiv overlay to rely on the long-lastingness of this publication 
platform. In ten years or so, with such committees and a good editing 
policy, such journals or conferences will be as well ranked as 
commercial ones.

However the subscription to the Elsevier or Springer electronic library 
will be needed for a long time, just to be able to get digitized 
versions of papers from the second half of the last century. This is a 
second, trickier, battlefield in the sense that the figth here must be 
carried on the copyright front. First, the copyright now extends far too 
long after the author's death. Secondly, some publishers, when 
digitizing some work, state wrongly that they perform a creative step, 
which prolongs their copyright by "resetting" the creation date. Here, 
the fight can almost only be solved by advocating politicians.

All the best

dc

-- 
David Chemouil
Onera - DTIM
Tel./fax: +33 (0) 5 6225 2936 / 2593
<http://www.onera.fr/staff/david-chemouil>


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