Thsi pledge has cause and effect backwards. Peer review is not visible; quality control can be skipped (and often is, in some venues.) Peer review is not the issue. Submittal is the issue.
Constrain input by not pledging not to submit in the first place as an author, and you'll have more effect. That's a visible impact. Pledging not to be involved in peer review for certain venues is like saying 'we'll still buy stuff from Amazon, but now we won't write customer reviews on it on the Amazon website'. Amazon won't care. If venues don't get the papers to consider for publishing in the first place, their business model will change faster. (I note that Microsoft and Google, where most signatories work, run search engines that would benefit from freely available content. This suggests that one goal might be not 'Research without walls' but 'Search without paywalls'.) Lloyd Wood http://sat-net.com/L.Wood/CCSR ________________________________________ From: [email protected] [[email protected]] On Behalf Of Jakob Eriksson [[email protected]] Sent: 22 October 2011 16:37 To: [email protected] Subject: [Tccc] Research without Walls I just read about this interesting initiative on Slashdot, with the summary: "Prominent Computer Science researchers from Google, Microsoft and UC Berkeley are starting to sign the 'Research Without Walls' pledge, promising to never be involved in peer review for a venue that does not make publications available to the public for free." http://www.researchwithoutwalls.org/ I'm probably going to sign this pledge myself, but I thought it'd be interesting to have a discussion about it before I do so. What are people's thoughts on open access publishing? Jakob Eriksson Assistant Professor University of Illinois at Chicago _______________________________________________ IEEE Communications Society Tech. Committee on Computer Communications (TCCC) - for discussions on computer networking and communication. [email protected] https://lists.cs.columbia.edu/cucslists/listinfo/tccc _______________________________________________ IEEE Communications Society Tech. Committee on Computer Communications (TCCC) - for discussions on computer networking and communication. [email protected] https://lists.cs.columbia.edu/cucslists/listinfo/tccc
