[Insight-users] IEEE Elections & Open Access

[Luis Ibanez]

  IEEE is currently holding elections for its board.


IEEE so far has been hostile to the notion of Open Access Publications,
mainly because the organization get about half of its revenue from
subscriptions to journals. For example, IEEE was among the organizations
that lobbied against the new NIH rule that publications of NIH-funded
research should be made freely available in PubMed.


If you are a supporter of *Open Access* and an *IEEE member*, here is
your opportunity for making hear your opinion on this issue.


As you vote for the new members, you may want to take into account
their position with respect to the Open Access movement.



You will find the full statements of the candidates at

                   http://www.ieee.org


As a help, here is the summary of the statements from
presidential candidates with respect to Open Access, as
it appeared in "The Institute" this month:


1) James Tien:

    Sales of IEEE publications account for approximately
    half of the IEEE revenue and therefore are not something
    that the organization can unilaterally and easily abandon.
    For example, total IEEE revenues reached US$ 247 million...


2) Gerald Peterson:

    suggested to look at the IEEE standards association's
    corporate membership program that allowed free downloads
    of its popular wireless networking suite of standards...
    ... industry groups have decided that wide dissemination of
    the new technologies took precedence over generating revenue...


3) Leah Jamieson:

    Pointed out that in a sense, papers are free. An author may post
    his or her paper on a corporate Web site, where it would be available
    for free to anyone. But the agglomeration and organization of all
    IEEE articles through the IEEE Xplore document delivery system adds
    value and is not free.



In my humble opinion we can interpret these statements as:


1) James Tien: IEEE is first of all a business and we should take
                care of making money instead of fulfilling the
                mission of a technical society.

    with his opinion, IEEE will end up like the American Chemical
    Society who opposed the creation of NIH Open Databases PubChem
    because it was detrimental to a paid service that the society
    provided:

     http://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/acs_pubchem.html

    as a response, Richard J. Roberts (Nobel Prize 1993) resigned
    to his 20 years membership to the ACS and posted the following
    open letter:

     https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/1977.html

     ACS (as well as IEEE) also oppossed Google initiative of
     Scholar Google, that fine tunned the search engine for
     searching technical and scientific literature.





2) Geral Peterson:  "If there is a will there is a way".
               At least he recognizes that dissemination of
               technical information is more important than
               generating revenue, and that IEEE have done
               so in some activities.




3) Leah Jamieson:  Dr. Jamieson seems to be is ill-informed
              on the US copyright laws,

               http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html

              and most of importantly on the standard policy of
              IEEE publicaitions of requiring copyright transfer
              from the authors to the society as a requisite for
              publishing in IEEE journals.

      http://www.ieee.org/about/documentation/copyright/cfrmlink.htm

              Progressive Open Access journals do not require
              authors to transfer their copyright, they simply
              obtain permission from them in order to disseminate
              the document. The Creative Commons Attribution License
              clearly demonstrates that other models are viable:

                http://creativecommons.org/about/licenses/






In any case,...


This is just to encourage you to take this factors into account when
you cast your ballot for IEEE board members. Just consider whether
IEEE is supposed to be a Corporation or a Technical Society.





     Luis