Ukraine’s call [Національної академії наук України]

A call for solidarity from the President of the National Academy of Sciences (HAH) of Ukraine as a letter in Nature. To help Ukraine scientists to relocate in European countries, if temporarily, #scienceforukraine is posting available positions. Worldwide. In a tribune, Nature has also opened a debate on whether or not “a comprehensive and worldwide boycott of all Russian research [should be enforced], and scientific journals [should] refuse to consider papers by researchers from Russia”. Reflecting on an earlier call from Ukraine’s scientific community to a similar effect, albeit limited to Russian Federation citizens getting access to EU grants [this is already in effect], academic mobility programs [as well], and to journal editorships. And to run international scientific events [like the ICM and EMS 2022 meetings]. While a complete boycott would add to the other sanctions adopted by some countries towards stopping the war, sanctions that impact the ordinary citizen more than the ruling nomenklatura, I doubt it would have any [short-term] significant effect: The Russian Science Foundation has already dropped its requirement to publish in indexed journals outside Russia. It would also most difficult to implement in practice (although I seem to remember SIAM journals rejecting papers co-signed by Iranian authors at some point…)

copyright antiques and antics…

I just cannot understand why publishers persist in requesting from us authors copyright agreements and even less  handwritten copyright forms that have to be sent back to them instead of via a simple email agreement or at least an electronic form. And because I cannot fill most those forms on line, it annoys me no end if only because it involves several physical steps, hence wasting my time. It would be just so easy to set an electronic copyright agreement if the publishers were under any form of pressure to do so. Hence I encourage everyone (sharing this irk!) to return a reply like the following one to each copyright request:

…why should I waste time printing, filling, scanning, and sending back this form in an era when electronic forms and signatures do exist and are accepted for legal matters? Commercial publishers request such paper antiques because they cannot be pressured into creating the proper electronic medium to handle copyright transfers.

‘gold’ open access & gold mine for publishers

Following a discussion within the IMS publication committee and the coincidental publication of a central double page in Le Monde, weekend science&techno section [not that it was particularly informative!], here are some thoughts of mine on open access and publications:

First, the EU is philosophically inclined toward Open Access and has been putting some money into the game towards that goal:

As of 2014, all articles produced with funding from Horizon 2020 will have to be accessible: articles will

either immediately be made accessible online by the publisher (‘Gold’ open access) – up-front publication costs can be eligible for reimbursement by the European Commission;

or researchers will make their articles available through an open access repository no later than six months (12 months for articles in the fields of social sciences and humanities) after publication (‘Green’ open access).

This means that putting IMS publications on arXiv or on HAL (which is compulsory for CNRS and AERES evaluations, hence for most French public researchers, contrary to what Le Monde states) is fine and sufficient for EU funded research. It seems to be the same in other countries (ok, EU is not yet a country!) like Australia…

My personnal position on the issue is that I do not understand the ‘gold’ open access perspective. Since tax-payers are supporting public-funded research, why should they support the journals that publish this research if it is available on a public depository like arXiv for free? Simply because the publication in the journals gives a validation of the scientific contents? The argument was that it would save money on public libraries subscribing to expensive journals like Elsevier‘s, but paying the ‘gold’ open access is another way of redirecting tax-payers money towards publishers’ pockets, so this sounds like a loophole… I would thus be very much in favour of keeping the arXiv solution as is, since it is the greenest one, as long as we comply with local national regulations.

yet another publishing spam

Here is another email Andrew and I got recently:

Dear Andrew Gelman , Christian P. Robert,

Science Publishing Group is an independent international publisher of 50+ open access, online, peer-reviewed journals covering a wide range of academic disciplines. From the google scholar, we get one of your original creative research paper titled “Not only defended but also applied”: The perceived absurdity of Bayesian inference published in Statistics .

We expect you describe the state-of-the-art in this field, such as the new contributions, ideas, or clarifications that resulted after the conference paper was presented. We expect your revised and extended paper will be published in our journals!

Full peer review: All manuscripts submitted to our journals undergo double blind peer review. Fast publication: Fast peer review process of papers within approximately one month of submission.

Low price: The article processing charge for one manuscript submitted before May 15 2013 is 70USD or 120USD.

While I do not understand why they put the quote in the middle of our title (!), it is astounding that a publishing company proposes to re-publish a paper without bothering about copyright laws. They do not even suggest a particular journal for our “creative research paper”… No, it is not a conference paper, no it was not published in Statistics! I love the final line: don’t they know that publishing is free of charge in most statistics journals?!