Dear Guy (L), Harry, and all others,
Guy Leduc wrote:
I'll try my best to review this, but let me say that only 8 days to let us review this document and comment on it, when it is so important, is not enough.
For example, I am away amost all the time this week and busy with lots of things.
Do they really want our comments? If so, they should give us a bit more time. Of course if they don't want our comments and want to expedite a decision, this is the right way to proceed. I always noted that they let things sleep for months (or years) and then suddently they need an answer within days.
We have a short group in TC6 headed by Harry Rudin. Perhaps would it be nice to have a short exchange of views within this group before replying anything.
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Harry Rudin added:
I do agree with what Guy wrote. I feel we are being railroaded by IFIP's rulers. One result from agreement with the Springer proposal will certainly be that we continue to be captive to Springer. We are already suffering from this in that being captive prevented us from negotiating with Google.
Perhaps Springer is the best we can do. The contract certainly has very strong benefits for Springer while IFIP, again as captive, has very little freedom of action.
Thanks to Guy Leduc, discussion has begun within our committee. But the chances of producing a careful analysis in eight days are small.
I have a slightly different view:
We have complained very much that IFIP doesn't offer a suitable digital library. It was always wanted that the procedure towards a DL must be much faster. And now, when we get a concrete proposal, we claim that things go too fast(?). Studying the Springer offer and giving first commetns on it (the decision procedure within IFIP will last until March 2007 (Council meeting) or even until Sept. 2007 (General Assembly) can easily be done within eight days or within 192 hours). It would be a pity - and an easy apology for further TC6 complaints - if we abstain from giving concrete comments. I would not like to repeat the story with the "New IFIP strategy" where TC6 just said that it is not worth the paper on which it was printed but when we were asked what we had to object concretely our "falcons" were suprprisingly quiet.
We have heard so often about some mysterious negotiations with Google (but we have never(!) seen a single printed line of such an offer). Personally, I don't give a penny or an EURO cent on these speculations any more.
Now to the Springer offer (from my point of view):
A. Nothing is for free, i.e. Springer would charge 20% on the bulk sales and a management cost of 60.000 USD per year (75.000 USD in the first year). The increase of bulk sale will make things more complicated for conference organisors; nevertheless, if you take a careful look into conference budgets then you will see that publication costs are, whereas substantial, still a minor factor in the global budget, sometimes less than the conference dinner. Thus we should be a little bit more realistic.
B. The analysis made by Joe Turner shows that the expected cost of the Springer offer is less than the "brute force" solution offered by BCS - which is gladly accepted in UK by the research community! (And the latter fact proves that such a solution may be quite acceptable).
C. The "home made" solution is the biggest risk since for redundancy reasons we would have to have to hire additional personell (since a single person might be ill or in holiday or unwilling or incompetent or leaving the job....) as well as additional hardware/software for redundancy - maybe even at different locations. Furthermore such a mome made solution would definitively be much less professional.
D. A serious question is about who would be paying the management cost: Would it come from IFIP central (and thus indirectly from the TC's - at least in part) or from the TC's directly? Probably not all of the TC's will participate; thus TC6 would have to pay a significant part, probably at least 10.000 of the 60.000 USD. Once again we have to see that open access will not come for free. We will need new business models for IFIP in order to survive.
E. Another major concern (see the analysis made by Joe Turner) will be the situation of small events who get the e-only publication offer. These costs are definitively too high in the current offer. However, these events can live very often with a CD-ROM + a local preprint. It has to be admitted that this is no "open access" but it would be reasonably cheap.
F. A major point (for me) is the fact that LNCS publications are not included in the present offer. We have many series which publsih in LNCS - such as "Networking xx" for example. Thus those conferences would not be included in the Open Access bundle or they would have to give up their LNCS publishing tradition. I would request that (if IFIP is keen to go along with the Springer SSBM offer) that one should try to include the IFIP-LNCS volumes (of course not the total amount of LNCS volumens).
In summary: The Springer offer is (for me) a step forward in the correct direction. It is better than expected (subjective view!). Apparently (once again a subjective view!) some people in IFIP (and in TC6 in particular) are not so happy with the new offer. If I can express one wish to those people: Please give concrete examples concerning deficiencies in the Springer offer (which may then be discussed with Springer) and make concrete proposals for better solutions (not only Googlish speculations).
Best regards Otto