Publishing and open access

Publication policy is an inevitable topic for researchers and no recent solution has a real consensus. In my opinion, current offers in terms of open publishing are far from being appropriate, at least in computer science. It is very important to keep in mind that the major issue of this question is the variety of interests and actors (and not just a matter of financial interest). Here are some recent points of view that I find interesting in the current debate.

First, the point of view of Professor Moshe Y. Vardi, editor-in-chief of Communications of the ACM. He explains in an article the principle of "Fair Access" pursued by ACM. An interesting point is that "in the case of publishing by a professional association, such as ACM, the authors, as ACM members, are essentially also the publishers." [1]

Another aspect of the debate, evaluation, is addressed in this article about "Open Evaluation" published in "Frontier in Computational Neuroscience" [2]. Again, in this article the close links between the different actors of the scientific publication (here readers and authors) are highlighted.

Finally, a small introduction about open publishing, from "Piled Higher and Deeper" by Jorge Cham, www.phdcomics.com: "What is Open Access". In my opinion, in this video the given view of open-access is over-simplified; however the last slides give interesting elements (“current scientific cultural practices”, “necessity to experiment some publishing practices”, “role of young researchers in the movement for change”)


[1] Moshe Y. Vardi, "Fair Access", Communications of the ACM, May 2012, Vol. 55 No. 5, Page 5
doi:10.1145/2160718.2160719

[2] Nikolaus Kriegeskorte, Alexander Walther, and Diana Deca, "An emerging consensus for open evaluation: 18 visions for the future of scientific publishing", Front. Comput. Neurosci. 6:94. doi:10.3389/fncom.2012.00094