IEEE Membership - to leave or not to leave, that is the question?

As an aside, this might be more of an society problem than an overall IEEE problem, since the Ultrasonic society sends you electronic formats of their transactions, and will send copies of their back issues on DVD for minimal cost.

Yep, You nailed it.

I dumped IEEE many years ago when they started requiring membership (or a big fee) to download papers from a specific group. Since I often sought papers outside my specialty I was pissed.

Dump IEEE and make friends with college students... that's how I get all the papers I want to read ;-) ...Jim Thompson

The IEEE is a very large organisation, and individual bits of it can be tot al rubbish. I'm a member of the Instrumentation and Measurement Society but what I have published (which isn't much) has been in the UK journal, Measu rement and Technology (which started off as the Journal of Scientific Inst ruments back in 1923).

I've published comments in Review of Scientific Instruments (whose electron ic refereeing tends to be horrible). but nothing in the IEEE journal.

I'm a member of the IEEE because I liked their journals as a whole, and I'm now on the committee of the NSW branch of the IEEE. There's a professor at MacQuarie (one of Sydney's several universities ) who is setting up an Ins trumentation and Measurement conference later this year, and I'm his commit tee liason (since I'm the only society member on the committee).

Academic publication is in transition. The switch to open access journals m ay take a while, because the publishers of peer-reviewed journals, having w orked out how to make a bundle out of selling stuff that they get for free, aren't happy to lose their cash cow.

Some journals will make papers open access if the authors will pay enough t o compensate them for the income they could have expected to make from sell ing access to that paper - something of the order of $1,000.

EEE.

Academic staff have the same access, but a pig-ignorant creep like Jim migh t have trouble making friends with academics.

I only keep it for the e-mail alias, and that only because I am too lazy to change it with a bunch of places.

I would like someone to conduct a poll of all IEEE members, to see what percentage are in favour of making the journals all open-access. Another option that should be presented in the poll is giving members free access to all journal articles older than some limit (2 years?) and/or giving the the general public free access to all articles older than some limit (5 years?), so that wealthy companies interested in the latest developments would keep paying for the latest articles.

I doubt a poll would change ieee policy but it would be nice to clarify whether the organisation is wilfully defying its members' wishes.

I can see why out of self-interest the ieee's permanent staff might fear the consequences of a reduction in revenues, but I don't think that it would necessarily harm the journals, since the unpaid reviewers and unpaid authors could continue creating the content for the same amount of nothing that they get now, regardless of whether it is open access.

On Jan 13, 2017, Chris Jones wrote (in article ):

Kind of misses the point. The economics of the IEEE are that of a publisher, and as such lives largely on the revenues from the publications it sells. Like any other publisher. This is clearly laid out in their Annual Report, which may be downloaded from their website.

The proposed poll is analogous to asking people in a bar if they would like beer to be free.

Joe Gwinn (IEEE Life Member)

Rational pricing would be OK. Prices for a typical IEEE paper are as much or more than for a whole book!

What irks me is that most of these papers were developed using taxpayer money. ...Jim Thompson

I was a student member (it was mandatory) and dropped it immediately on graduating. I can access the papers at a nearby library, but I've never seen one that was worth the trip.

Open access journals have much higher page charges--iirc Optics Express is like $1500/page.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

On Jan 13, 2017, Jim Thompson wrote (in article):

So, buy the book? How does one determine that ?rational? means? Ask the beer-hall patrons?

For perspective, it?s Elsevier that is driving the scientific community to revolt. More later.

Articles written by USG employees cannot be copyrighted, but most articles are copyrighted In the Standards world, where I did most of my work, most of the labor is provided by the attendees, and not the IEEE. The attendees are usually company-funded; this is generally necessary to cover the heavy travel costs.

The rest is academic work, much of which has been grant-funded. There has long been talk in Congress of requiring the products of such research to be open-access, but this would likely crater the academic publishing industry, and nobody was willing to do that.

Springer in particular is driving a lot of fields to ArXiv.org and the like. This is most likely the long-term solution. But an academic researcher in Russia,Alexandra Elbakyan, has set up a bypass mechanism called SciHub .

Story:.

I?m betting that she will lose in court in NYC, and that it will make zero difference. I?m sure it was a big struggle to find a Russian hacker to help her penetrate those paywalls.

Joe Gwinn

EEE.

No surprise there. You have to understand what you reading before you can f ind it useful, and John Larkin skipped too many lectures at Tulane to have the background knowledge required to make most technical papers intelligibl e.

Jim William's application note on on the Linear Technology TEC controller

doesn't include the equation that relates the heat shifted through the Pelt ier junction to the current being pushed through it. When I contacted him a bout this he resorted to the Stephen Hawking defence - every successive eq uation in a text halves the potential readership.

I was dubious about this applying to application notes, but if John Larkin is a representative reader it may be true.

I originally joined to have medical insurance which ultimately became unaffordable. While a member, I became the chair of the DC area Consultants Network. That small organization was only as effective as the chair made it to be and once I stepped down I believe it went into hibernation. In the meantime I participated in the local regional chapter only to find it was a rather inbred good-ol-boys (and girls) network with the chairs abusing the office by making unilateral decisions. No one else seemed to care about the fact they were repeatedly operating outside their bylaws so I gave up and quit.

The only reason I could see that anyone was in the group was to have something to pad their resume. I now know listing activity in the IEEE regional chapter side is likely to be more of a negative indicator than a positive one.

I have been a member, but I found the IEEE too USA centric. It was not nice to belong to one of these "rest of the world" regions and being bombarded with all the goodies for US members only and still pay the full price.

I found the journal articles (my field is embedded computer security) mostly either too technical or too generic and rather expensive.

If the IEEE did not pretend to act in the interests of its members then I might agree with you about the role of the IEEE being a publishing company, (though only to the extent that authors and reviewers were paid for their work, which is generally not at all).

I think in the spirit of your analogy, it is like a bar where you are only allowed to enter if you pay an annual fee, then when you get there you have to make the beer yourself and provide the glasses, then the bartender pours the beer you made into a glass you provided and sells it to another member for $15 per mouthful, and the bartender keeps the money. Then everyone gathers around and elects next year's bartender, but none of the candidate bartenders ever suggests the option of changing the beer prices, or remunerating the volunteer brewers. I guess if they did then the bouncers (also paid from beer sales) would escort the candidate bartender off of the premises.

I certainly won't be assigning the copyright of any more papers to the IEEE under the current system. Not a great loss to them in my case, but I hope others who have more interesting things to write do the same.

I wonder whether this is necessary, or just a consequence of lack of competition.

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The Public Library of Science has fairly high page charges - it costs money to pay a bunch of editors to push free papers out to free reviewers and ma ke sense of the reviews.

Some journals don't pay their editorial board either - becoming a member of the US academy of science makes you one of the editors of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science - but they still have to pay for secreta ries and accountants and office space.

Somebody has to run the web sites, do the typesetting, pay for the hosting, and keep the lights on at HQ. Also societies pay travel expenses even for their volunteers.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

(Former member of an OSA committee)

On Jan 14, 2017, Chris Jones wrote (in article ):

Unlike most commercial publishers, their readers and writers have significant say in how the IEEE is run. The President of the IEEE is an elective position.

Well, the analogy started out sounding like a British private gentlemen?s club in the 1800s, and then went into the weeds when the bartender staged a coup.

The IEEE has 420,000 paying members, all of which can vote with their feet, and they must think the deal is good enough. This business model has held up since 1884. The founding members include Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell.

It?s your choice. You may be happier on the outside. Note that the IEEE will not be publishing your papers unless they have been assigned the copyright, unless you are a US Government employee.

Joe Gwinn

I used to read the election literature carefully, but as far as I am aware none of the candidates has ever suggested policies that would make me inclined to vote for them. I used to try to vote for the one with the least bad policies but haven't bothered in recent years. I feel about as empowered as a shareholder in a large commercial publishing company would. They get to vote too, at the shareholder meetings.

You objected to my suggestion above of a poll of members. Why? Is it because the IEEE is not there for the benefit of its members? If so, then it should say so plainly and honestly, but otherwise I don't think is is right to limit the scope of topics upon which members can vote.

Yes, no drinkers would put up with such policies, but somehow engineers do.

Yes, but I wonder how many of them are like me, and don't agree with the copyright policies but stick around out of laziness or for other benefits of membership.

As I said, I liked the e-mail alias, and have been too lazy (or too little concerned about the money) to stop using it completely.

Once upon a time IEEE spectrum used to be interesting, before it was dumbed-down and started being written by non-engineers, for non-engineers. Here is a classic of the new era:

Yes, business models that are very profitable tend to endure but this does not necessarily make them "good" (or "bad") in my opinion. I think that as a professional society as opposed to any ordinary company, the IEEE should ideally act in the best interest of its members and humanity, rather than just itself. I think that the IEEE could be a lot more beneficial to its members and to humankind by having more permissive access policies, without reducing its income to the point of being unsustainable. I suggest that they try to charge for the things that big companies want, and give away the things that big companies don't much care for, but which would benefit humankind. e.g. old classic papers, or anything in chip design more than a few years old, could be given away without affecting the desire of large companies to buy a subscription to view the latest papers (from the last year or so).

I know their policy and I wouldn't want them to publish my work again in their paywalled journals. (Not suggesting I would write anything worth publishing again any time soon.)

Yes, this example shows that the ieee does cave in when given no other alternative, by a large enough block of authors.

It does seem that most authors don't care very much about all of this, because few of them do as I do and take advantage of ieee's quite reasonable policy that allows authors to put a copy of a draft version of the paper on the author's personal website. If authors systematically did this (and if mirroring those websites were permitted in case an author dies or abandons their website), and someone else indexed it, then it would largely fix the problem for new work (at which point the IEEE would presumably change their policy), though in any case all of the old classic papers would remain paywalled until after governments stop extending the term of copyright. Maybe that will happen when the term of copyright reaches the heat death of the universe plus 75 years.