[open-linguistics] Draft codex for academic publishing

Fri Sep 28 11:57:37 UTC 2018

Dear Sebastian, dear all,

very nice initiative, and I 'm sympathetic with it, but can you be a  
little bit more specific? Do you suggest to design a letter of support for  
CEUR, or to go beyond that and develop a charta for authors to sign, or  
rules of best practice to be followed by editors and conference  
organizers. The latter two seem similar but in fact they are not:

- A charta to be signed by (potential) authors means that either all rules  
should be set to SHOULD rather than MUST -- because authors have limited  
influence on the publication form chosen by organizers and editors. So, if  
an author doesn't want to be self-contradictive, none of these rules  
should prevent him/her from future publishing at the preferred venues of  
his/her target community. Signing your rule 2 as currently stated means,  
for example, that an author should no longer to publish at LREC (CC-BY-NC)  
-- ACL would be ok, though, but it doesn't provide a publication channel  
for language resources.

- Rule of best practice for editors and conference organizers can be much  
stricter, and they can work like a Certification Mark (think of  
Fairtrade), with a nice logo as a visual sign of their high standards, but  
then we need some kind of organization to check those conditions. We can  
indeed act as (or form) such an organization -- and automatize these  
checks --, but we need somebody committing him/herself to the task.

I think it might work either way. But I also think these rules need a  
deeper discussion.

I think we need to differentiate between papers and monographs. I don't  
see a good and prominent publication channel for monographs outside the  
publishing industry. Correct my if I'm wrong, but institution-level  
publication (traditionally referred to as "grey literature") is neither  
equally recognized nor does it help gaining visibility. For example, I  
cannot recall to have seen any book review for such in-house publications  
anywhere, ever.

With respect to CC-BY vs. CC0, the function of CC-BY is not so much to  
make sure people cite you (which they should anyway), but to control how  
they do. It doesn't help your citation score if people point to the URL  
where they got the document from. This is particularly important for  
publishing datasets, because CC-BY 3.0 (or before) allows the author of  
the data set to point to a specific publication to be used (this is the  
"title", dropped in CC-BY 4.0).

With respect to ND, this does not pertain to normal scientific use, e.g.,  
quotes and indirect quotes, because (at least  in German law) that is one  
of the exceptions of copyright (so, this cannot be restricted nor  
permitted by *any* license). However, writing a grammar and then having  
someone (maybe unqualified, in your eyes) to re-write your grammar and  
publish under your both names (perfectly in line with CC-BY) is certainly  
something I can imagine a linguist would like to prevent. So, ND may have  
a point also in our area. It should not be a preferred option, of course.

Another area where a charta or rules of best practice would help is to  
bring some structure into the somewhat messy area of green open access,  
i.e., publication via self-archiving or designated websites for draft  
papers (which basically entails NC, cf.  
https://www.publisso.de/en/advice/publishing-advice-faqs/difference-between-gold-and-green-open-access/).  
When we did the LDL-2012 book, we published with Springer. At this time,  
this was helpful to establish a reference publication for the area, but  
also, the Springer contract explicitly allowed us/the authors to do  
self-archiving (of drafts, not the finals, of course). So, we used this  
exception to create a website with green OA `shadow proceedings'. It  
lacked a number of chapters which were specifically written for the book  
by the editors, but it contained the drafts of all accepted submissions. I  
still think that this was a good compromise, also between availability and  
sustainability, because the LDL-2012 website hasn't been reactivated after  
a server crash, whereas the book is still available. (And this is one of  
the great risks associated with community-based, free open access  
publishing -- unless it involves a funding model or a long-term commitment  
of some kind of independently funded organization [such as a library], it  
tends to depend on selected individuals and their positions and if this  
position changes or technical difficulties arise, suddenly everything  
disappears. Think of The Language Archive/DoBeS at MPI Nijmegen and its  
transition between its original and any possible future home -- at least  
it used to be for several years. I am wondering about the sustainability  
of CEUR, and maybe, their request comes out of exactly this problem.)

But green access is `messy' in the sense that different publishers define  
it differently. Elsevier, for example, puts embargo periods of different  
duration on their green OA papers. In the area of NLP, where pre-prints  
are becoming almost more important than actual publications, this is an  
absolute no-go. On the other hand, in certain areas of linguistics, e.g.,  
when we talk about grammars or dictionaries, waiting for a year or two  
doesn't make much of a difference. Harrassowitz follows this policy, and  
they do a lot of historical and low-resource languages. AFAIK, de Gruyter  
is much more restrictive. For scientific papers, I think it would be nice  
to express a preference of CC-BY over Green OA without embargo period over  
OA with embargo over Gold OA (which tends to be unaffordable) and to  
communicate this to conference organizers and editors of collected  
volumes. Some funding organizations do. The German federal ministry of  
education and science (BMBF) accepts a one-year embargo for Open Access  
publications. However, we might want to formulate our own principles.

Just my 2ct. I'm curious what others think.

Best,
Christian

Am .09.2018, 11:24 Uhr, schrieb Bettina Klimek  
<klimek at informatik.uni-leipzig.de>:

>
>    
> Hello everyone,
>    
>
>    
> I am forwarding this message on behalf of Sebastian Hellmann to
>      you.
>
>
>    
> Regards,
>
>
>    
> Bettina
>    
>
>    
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>    
>
>    
> Hi all,
>
>
>    
> http://ceur-ws.org/     was recently reaching out to strengthen their  
> legal position,
>      asking for feedback.
>    
>
>    
> We live in an area of web-publishing. In fact, the role of
>      publishers is definitely in question. However. there is no clear
>      idea how to do it.  From my perspective, the publisher function of
>      persisting papers can be achieved by libraries/universities. The
>      function of distribution and visibility of papers by better and
>      free/open metadata.
>    
>
>    
> If these two functions are substituted - to the best of my
>      knowledge -  it seems that a simple codex can be derived with four
>      rules:
>
>
>    
> 1. papers MUST be published royalty-free without compensation
>      (open access for everyone)
>
>
>    
> 2. Copyright stays with the authors. Authors MAY choose to give
>      up some of their rights and license under CC-BY, as the sole
>      option.
>
>    
>
>    
> 3. SA, NC, ND are strongly discouraged as they stir false
>      expectations and are conflicting with unwritten academic rules
>
>
>    
> 4.  metadata, i.e. bibliographic data like bibtex SHOULD be CC-0
>
>
>    
> Some explanations:
>
>
>    
> 1. is a no-brainer, papers are published to be read. Payment is a
>      serious barrier of knowledge transfer
>
>
>    
> 2.  this works with transparent web publishing platforms like  
> http://ceur-ws.org/
>      . So it is an idealisation and might not always work *yet*.
>    
>
>    
> 3. in detail:
>
>
>    
> - BY, the only viable option matching expectation on reality,
>      however an unnecessary one. In science, you are obliged to cite
>      otherwise it is plagiarism, which is serious. So the good
>      scientific practice implies BY without explicit license. On the
>      other hand, science is liberal, so you can copy and modify
>      basically anything and use it as long as you cite it. This is
>      often anchored in national academic law.
>    
>
>    
> - ND propagates false expectation, since you can still derive. In
>      fact, science is meant to derive and build upon previous work.
>      What good is a license if you can't enforce it.
>
>
>    
> - NC most of the times the valuable part are the ideas described
>      in the paper. They are described (hopefully ;) in a way so that
>      they are reproducible. A license is not a patent, so basically
>      anybody can still exploit your ideas. https://xkcd.com/     NC  
> makes sense for XKCD, meaning you can't print T-Shirts with it
>      and sell it. With papers you can read it and use the information
>      to commercialise, just the exact text is licensed
>
>    
>
>    
> - SA In my opinion SA has the purpose that you can track the
>      modifcations by others and if something good comes up you can
>      reintegrate it as is. I am not sure, if this has a place in
>      academic publishing. I can't imagine a scenario, where scientist X
>      publishes under SA and then enforces that scientist Y using and
>      citing his work properly is obligated to also publish under SA.
>    
>
>    
> 4. might be changed from SHOULD to MUST clearly we would all
>      benefit from this.
>    
>
>    This is the current state in my head as it makes sense to me and I
>    see great potential in it. However, we need to discuss, refine and
>    consolidate it as a community.
>    
>    --
>    All the best,
>
>    Sebastian Hellmann
>
>    
>     Director of Knowledge Integration and Linked Data
>      Technologies (KILT) Competence Center
>
>      at the Institute for Applied Informatics (InfAI) at Leipzig
>      University
>
>      Executive Director of the DBpedia Association
>
>      Projects: http://dbpedia.org, http://nlp2rdf.org,  
> http://linguistics.okfn.org,
>      https://www.w3.org/community/ld4lt
>
>      Homepage: http://aksw.org/SebastianHellmann
>
>      Research Group: http://aksw.org
>

-- 
Prof. Dr. Christian Chiarcos
Applied Computational Linguistics
Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität Frankfurt a. M.
60054 Frankfurt am Main, Germany

office: Robert-Mayer-Str. 10, #401b
mail: chiarcos at informatik.uni-frankfurt.de
web: http://acoli.cs.uni-frankfurt.de
tel: +49-(0)69-798-22463
fax: +49-(0)69-798-28931