The IEEE should be helping the dissemination of knowledge in its field, but its requirement and use of copyright transfer from authors strongly and unjustifiably hinders this purpose. It is important to correct the problem, and I can only see this happening by many members pressing for change.
In little more than a decade, the availability through the internet of millions of scientific and technical publications has occurred, with the potential for making complex searches to identify the few that are most relevant to a particular subject. This is an immense advance over the time-consuming searches previously required with only printed literature available. Many freely accessible services already exist for indexing the available work. As long as publications on the web are available to anyone with an internet connection, then they can be found easily, the relevance of search results can be checked in seconds just by skimming through them, and the benefits are received even by people in small companies and in the many universities that cannot afford the cost of current subscriptions.
Some journals (I've noticed this especially in biological and medical fields) are open in this way. The IEEE, I deeply regret, is not: to skim through the fulltext of a search result will require something like $20, perhaps just to discover it wasn't very usful; users at a subscribing institution get a limited number of simultaneous logins to access the publications, and many, many institutions even in well-off countries simply cannot afford the high price of this subscription. The cost of all of this restriction is that surely some millions of people working in engineering and science are wanting, but simply not able, to get efficient and affordable access to a wealth of published material in their fields. The current state of free mirrors and search services could make all this material available for all these people, yet this is prevented by the IEEE's insistence on preventing such distribution.
The value of a published work is due to the efforts of the authors and, in the case of reviewed journals, the editor and reviewers for their suggested improvements and their assertion that the work meets some requirement of quality. For journal and conference publications of the IEEE, these people do their work without charge, producing a ready-to-print electronic copy of a reviewed paper that costs nothing to the IEEE. The only thing that the IEEE can reasonably claim for with recent publications is the cost of printing and posting paper copies and of running its search and download facility on the web: these are services of secondary importance, which could be charged for to users who want to use IEEE's printing and IEEE's webserver rather than their own printer and publicly available servers. Older publications, requiring expense for their scanning into electronic form, are another matter, much more reasonable for getting revenue from restricted availability.
It could perhaps be a problem for the IEEE to publish journals in which each author asserted copyright under varied conditions. It cannot be a problem to publish papers that the author has given into the public domain. Papers for which the IEEE cannot assert blanket copyright are already accepted in certain conditions that the IEEE has been basically forced into by supply and demand: work funded by the US government has to be unprotected by copyright at least in the US, and work funded by the UK government remains Crown Copyright with certain rights of publication granted to the journal. But, the required IEEE copyright transfer form, for everyone whose work isn't backed by the conditions of a government grant, requires that the authors give exclusive rights to the IEEE, which then uses the rights to restrict access to the work. This clearly cannot be necessary in order for the publisher to be within the law; it is done to preserve a profitable enterprise for publishing and electronic distribution.
In other `markets' this would not be such a problem; authors who want their work to be widely and easily available would avoid the IEEE. I know of several authors who do this already in more mathematical disciplines where there are plenty of similarly appropriate potential journals with better copyright policy. In some engineering areas, however, there just isn't much choice if one wants to make contact with the right audience around the world. This, together with the point that some of the people directly concerned with IEEE copyright policy are likely to be those whose jobs depend on its present form that generates extra work in `defending' papers from distribution by anyone else, granting permission for the use of a figure in some other work, and running the only legally permitted means of distribution, makes it necessary for members to push for the IEEE's copyright policy to be updated to this age where typesetting, archiving, searching and distribution have changed so much that the traditional system of scientific publishing is an anachronistic menace!
Ideally, the electronic copies of publications
would be made available to mirror sites for indexing
and downloading, while the business of paper copies
and IEEE-Xplore could continue for those who want
these `premium services'.
Less magnanimously, but still much better than now,
all authors should at least be given the chance to
declare their work as being in the public domain, so
that they can also make it freely available from their own
webpages and on publicly accessible archives.
Page started: 2007-05-19
Last change: 2011-03-29