[Tugindia] [OT] article on (open) scientific publishing

[Kapil Hari Paranjape]

Hello

Apropos the discussion on Scientific publishing started by Ajit Ranade
continued by CVR and Sashikaran Ganesh:

Perhaps not surprisingly, the article quoted by Ajit Ranade is itself
unavailable without subscription! To quote from the web page:

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 You may be interested to know that the International Mathematical Union
 endorsed certain "Best Practices" for authors, readers, libraries and
 publishers of mathematics:

	http://www.ceic.math.ca/Publications/Recommendations/3_best_practices.shtml

In particular, not many authors seem to be aware that you can
cross out various clauses that you do not agree with in the copyright
agreement before you return it to the publisher; in most cases the
publisher has not been known to object since the number of these
singularities is small!

There is also no known case of a publisher suing an author for putting up
a research paper on a publicly accessible web-site before or after
publishing it in the publisher's journal. The only objections that I
have heard of are for putting the paper *in the form published* (i.e.
with the journals header's and formatting and the like) on a web-site.

Maintaining high accessibility (e.g. via e-print sites or home pages)
ought to be important for authors but currently (via citation indices
and the like) the academic community seems to have opted for high
visibility instead. The distinction is between data and meta-data.
The latter consists of the title, authorship, date of publication and where
published. Quite often, this in itself will give an author "benefits"
like jobs, promotion etc.

Perhaps journals should charge institutes for providing this information
(in some certified form of course!) and leave the authors free to
distribute their material if they desire. Thus you would pay to obtain a
certificate that (let's say) A. U. Thor's paper on "Completely Agreeable
Spaces" was accepted by Elsewhere Press's prestigious journal "The
Vaults of Mathematics" but A. U. Thor and others could freely distribute
the content. Done electronically such certificates could be made
eyes-only and non-transferrable as well!

This would be logical since there is absolutely no monetary value
attached to the actual content of most research papers, but there is
monetary value attached to the meta-data.

Alas the world is not a particularly logical place ...

Kapil.
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