[tor-talk] Roger's status report, Dec 2012

[Paul Syverson]

On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 02:31:33PM -0500, Roger Dingledine wrote:
> 
> 10) Refused a journal review for the IEEE Transactions on Information
> Forensics & Security, since they're not open-access. I forwarded my mail
> to an IEEE publisher representative to make sure they knew my reason
> for refusing; she had the audacity to reply that actually they *are*
> open-access, since they have an option where they let an author pay
> them three thousand dollars per article to not lock the pdf behind their
> paywall. That's exactly the dead-end strategy the for-profit publishing
> corporations are taking. Shame on IEEE for claiming to have my field's
> best interests in mind.
> 

This might not be what you or I would mean by "open access", but it is
not IEEE misappropriating your term either. Theirs is a meaning of
"open access" that is long in use and not just by commercial
publishers. For example, the favorite cited instance of open access in
the wider press, PLoS, works on that model---actually like IEEE but
less flexible: there's no option to have a paywall.  You simply must
give them thousands up front.  (Although if you can claim hardship,
you can avoid author fees.) I don't disagree with your overall
sentiment, but your indignation over the term is no more likely to be
a winning approach than fighting the broader media about the use of
"hacker" (and possibly with less legitimacy since there the
misappropriation of the term from its original use is unambiguous and
well established).

aloha,
Paul