The problem with academic journals 4

Or, why I'm not boycotting Elsevier.

"You never change something by fighting the existing reality. To change something build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." - R. Buckminster Fuller

This is the fourth post in a series about the problems with the big academic journal publishers. In summary: the journals get their content for free; get their quality control (peer review / refereeing) for free; and get their editors for free, yet they charge many thousands of dollars for subscriptions. This bad situation has been compounded by publishers like Elsevier basically trying to buy a law that directly attacks open-access journals.

In response to this, and to other bad behaviour, calls for a boycott of Elsevier have culminated in this website being launched, where scientists can pledge to not submit, referee or edit for Elsevier journals. At the time of writing, around 3000 scientists have already done so.

I am not one of them, and I will not be one of them. I have several reasons for taking this position, some of them idealistic, and others pragmatic.

Firstly, I agree with the sentiment from Fuller above: it is better to create something new than to tear down the old. In this case, it means that it is better to support open access journals than to boycott traditional journals. In other words, let the old journals wither away into history because they have been made obsolete, not because one particular publisher has been throttled by a boycott.

Secondly, boycotting one publisher (Elsevier, in this case) won't achieve much. Other publishers, who are guilty of much the same behaviour as Elsevier, will simply pick up the slack, that is, they will see an increase in submissions that would have otherwise have gone to Elsevier journals. The boycott might hurt Elsevier, but it won't fix the problem with academic journals.

Thirdly, there is a lack of alternative venues for some fields. For my ecological research, the most appropriate journals are Ecological Informatics and Ecological Modelling, both of which are published by Elsevier. There is an open-access alternative to them, Computational Ecology and Software, but it is less than a year old and has yet to become anywhere near as established as the incumbents.

Fourthly, students and junior researchers do not have much of a choice where they submit their papers. If your supervisor says to submit your paper to an Elsevier journal, do you really have a choice about it?

Finally, any early-career researcher who signs on to this boycott is setting themselves up for some trouble down the line. As an early-career researcher myself, I ask myself, do I want to mark myself as someone who will not try to publish in the top journals in my field, just because they are published by Elsevier? I need to publish in the most appropriate and highly-ranked journals in my field, and for me, most of those are published by Elsevier. Put another way, I don't have a permanent job yet, so I need to publish in the most appropriate and highly-ranked journals for the sake of my career. I need to develop my career because I have a family to support. If that makes me a coward, at least I'll be a coward who can feed his family.

We will not solve the problems with academic journals by boycotting any one publisher. We will solve the problems with academic journals by supporting open access journals. That means submitting papers to them, refereeing papers for them, and volunteering on their editorial boards. I am supporting CES, by publishing papers with them, and by working on their editorial board. I might even start my own open-access journal one day. But we need more top researchers to get involved with open access journals. We need the big names to support them, so they get the citations they need to increase their impact factors, so the journals become more desirable venues in which to publish.

If there were a site where scientists could pledge to submit, referee and do editorial work for open-access journals, I would sign up there. I might even set it up myself - it's not like I need to sleep, is it?

Reminder: paper submission deadline SEAL 2012

A reminder that the deadline for submitting papers to the 9th International Conference on Evolution and Learning (SEAL) 2012 is 1 May 2012. This conference will be held in Hanoi, Vietnam, 16-19 December, 2012.

Reminder: paper submission deadline for ICARIS 2012

A reminder that the deadline for submitting papers to the 11th International Conference on Artificial Immune Systems (ICARIS) 2012 is 1 March 2012. This conference will be held in Taormina, Italy, 28-21 July, 2012.

Reminder: Paper submission deadline for PRICAI 2012

A reminder that the deadline for papers submitted to the 12th Pacific Rim International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (PRICAI) 2012 is March 1, 2012. This conference will be held in Kuching, Malaysia, September 3-7, 2012.

Publishing or perishing

The single most important metric by which an academic is judged is their peer-reviewed publication record. Promotion, grant applications, and finding new jobs all depends on having a strong publication record. This has long been described as "Publish or perish", because if you don't publish, you perish - either you don't advance in your job, you can't find a job, or you don't keep your job. Now, I've got a reasonably long publication record, but I'm always looking for ways of boosting my research output (see my previous posts on publishing in computational intelligence).

Several years ago, biologist Phil Clapham published an excellent essay on the need for academics to publish their research. One of his rules, that I am applying to my own work, is to have at least one paper under review at all times. Now, this can be pretty hard work - there is always variation in the amount of time that papers spend in review, and reviewer comments can take a long time to address. But, it does lead to building up your publication record quite quickly.

One outcome of this rule, though, is that one should also be writing at least one paper at any given time, while also generating sufficient publishable results for at least one paper at any given time. That is, while at least one paper is in review, you need to be writing at least one paper, and also writing code / designing experiments / performing analyses to go into at least one other paper. So, publishing is like being on a treadmill: as soon as you submit one paper, you need to get to work on getting the next submitted, while lining up the material for the one after that.

While this does encourage the practice of breaking research projects into small, easily published (and easily understood) chunks, I suspect it may also encourage further proliferation of single publon papers. Whether or not this is a bad thing, I've leave to you to decide.

Another way to boost your publication count is to collaborate. A lot. Computational intelligence is a particularly useful field to come from for collaborating, as the algorithms we study can be applied to so many problems. But that's all a topic for another post.

Call for papers: Applications of ECoS

Special issue of Evolving Systems on

Applications of Evolving Connectionist Systems

Guest Editor

Michael J. Watts
University of Adelaide, Australia
mjwatts@ieee.org

Scope

The topic of this special issue is “Applications of Kasabov’s Evolving Connectionist Systems”.

In modern society, the volume and rate of data production are huge and set to increase. To process and utilise this avalanche of data, methods are needed that can rapidly and accurately model it as it becomes available. These models must be able to learn throughout their lifetimes, without forgetting what they have previously learned, and be able to explain themselves.

Kasabov’s Evolving Connectionist Systems (ECoS) are able to fulfil each of these requirements. They are a class of constructive neural networks that learn via structural growth and adaptation. They have a fast, one-pass learning algorithm, where all that can be learnt from the data is learned in the first training pass. Because of their open structure, they exhibit continuous, life-long learning whereby the structure expands as necessary to accommodate new data. Finally, they have a strong resistance to catastrophic forgetting following additional training on new data.

Examples of ECoS networks include the Evolving Fuzzy Neural Network (EFuNN), which was the first ECoS network published and is characterised by embedded fuzzy logic elements. There is also the Simple Evolving Connectionist System (SECoS), which is essentially an EFuNN with the fuzzy elements removed, and the Dynamic Evolving Fuzzy Inference System (DENFIS) for discovering Takagi-Sugeno style fuzzy rules. Many ECoS networks use fuzzy rule extraction algorithms that allow for the explanation of what the networks have learned, in a comprehensible manner.

ECoS networks are well suited to applications that are dealing with new data continuously and that have dynamic, time-critical aspects. Previous applications of ECoS include:

• Stock market prediction and macroeconomic modelling
• Speech recognition, especially multi-speaker speech recognition
• Bioinformatics and medical modelling
• Image and video parsing
• Robot control
• Information system security

The special issue is concerned with all aspects of the application of ECoS networks to real-life problems and data sets. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Applications of ECoS to real-world problems
• Data mining of complex data sets using ECoS
• Comparisons of ECoS with other algorithms over real-world data sets
• Modifications of ECoS algorithms to fit them to real-world problems

Proposed Schedule

• Submission due date: 16 April, 2012
• Preliminary notification of acceptance: 4 June, 2012
• Revised manuscripts due: 9 July, 2012
• Final acceptance notification: 6 August, 2012
• Final version due: 3 September, 2012
• Intended publication date: January, 2013

Submission

 The special issue invites original contributions within the specified scope. Manuscripts must not be under review elsewhere, nor can they have been previously published. Extended conference papers must contain at least 30% new material. Please format all manuscripts according to the Instructions for Authors:

 http://www.springer.com/physics/complexity/journal/12530

Please submit all papers via the online submission system:

 https://www.editorialmanager.com/evos/

Conference paper deadline: IJCCI 2012

The deadline for submitting papers to the International Joint Conference on Computational Intelligence (IJCCI) 2012 is 19 April 2012. This conference will be held in Barcelona, Spain, 5-7 October, 2012.

Paper submission deadline: IEEE CIG 2012

The deadline for submitting papers to the IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence in Games (IEEE CIG) 2012 is 15 April 2012. This conference will be held in Granada, Spain, 12-15 September, 2012.

Call for papers: IEEE CIMSA 2012

The deadline for submitting papers to the IEEE International Conference on Computational Intelligence for Measurement Systems and Applications (IEEE CIMSA) 2012 is 15 March 2012. This conference will be held in Tianjin, China, 2-4 July 2012.

Reminder: paper submission deadline for ICML 2012

A reminder that the deadline for submitting papers to the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) 2012 is 24 February 2012. This conference will be held in Edinburgh, Scotland, June 26 - July 1, 2012.

Call for papers: CIDM 2012

The deadline for submitting papers to the Third International Workshop on Computational Intelligence for Disaster Management (CIDM) 2012 is March 25 2012. This workshop will be held in Bucharest, Romania, 19-21 September 2012.

Conference paper deadline: AAIA 2012

The deadline for submitting papers to the 7th International Symposium Advances in Artificial Intelligence and Applications (AIAA) 2012 is 22 April 2012. This conference will be held in Wroclaw, Poland, 9-12 September, 2012.

The problem with academic journals 3

I've tried to stay away from politics on this blog, as I want to keep it as professional as I can, and politics is one of the two things (along with religion) guaranteed to make otherwise pleasant and rational people lose all self control. But sometimes, politics intrudes into the academy: as Pericles put it "Just because you do not take an interest in politics does not mean politics won't take an interest in you".

I've discussed the problems with academic journals twice before. What has prompted me to revisit the topic, and break my taboo on politics on this blog, is the Research Works Act, which is nothing less than a direct assault by the US government on open access journals. Not that the US government per se has anything against open access journals: journal publishers like Elsevier do, though, so what they've done is whack down a sack of cash in front of their tame congress members and bought a law. This law, if passed, would ban US government funding agencies from requiring that papers resulting from their funding be made available as open access publications. This has caused a firestorm in the academic blogosphere, with calls for scholarly societies to withdraw from the American Association of Publishers (one of the groups lobbying in favour of the law), and with some even going so far as to call academic publishers enemies of science.

I have published in open-access journals. I'm even on the editorial board of one, and I find this law extremely disturbing. It is in direct contrast to other countries such as the UK, where a new policy from the science minister requires the results of publicly funded research to be open-access. It is simply a desperate attempt by the established journal publishers to protect a business model that is going the way of horse-drawn carriages and rotary-dial telephones.

Although one could argue that, as a New Zealand citizen resident in Australia, this will not really effect me, the USA has a habit of forcing it's laws on other countries. How long before other countries, like Australia or New Zealand, get similar laws? Even if this proposed law is defeated in the USA, does anyone seriously think that the publishers will give up trying to kill open access journals?

Open access is the future of academic publishing. Publishers are trying to protect a failing business model by exploiting a political system that seems, to someone raised in a Westminster-style democracy, quite corrupt. Since we have no chance of changing that system, the only response open to scientists is to move away from publishing in the journals published by companies like Elsevier, and publish instead in open-access journals. In other words, cut the journal publishers out completely and starve them of the quality papers they need to be successful.

Over the next several weeks, I will be collating a list of open-access computational intelligence journals, and reviewing a selection of papers from each. It's time to take open-access seriously. It's time to embrace the future, and to leave the old publishers in the dustbin of history.

IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Call for Social Media Subcommittee members

Dear CIS members,

This is a call for active participation in the CIS Social Media Subcommittee.

The Social Media Subcommittee, established in 2011, is a subcommittee under the Member Activities committee of CIS. Our objectives are to promote CIS membership and activities, to leverage our online presence, and build our leadership in CIS-related research and industrial communities.

Social Media have become very popular in recent years. Examples include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Second Life. They have become part of our lives and some of the major channels to get updates about our friends and the rest of the world. Our mission is to keep you up-to-date about CIS and computational intelligence-related information in the most direct and timely manner. You will no longer miss deadlines for submitting papers to our conferences and you will be able to get involved in discussions of the hottest topics in computational intelligence with our professionals.

The Subcommittee is continuously seeking to develop new and innovative initiatives for promoting CIS with Social Media. We are looking for enthusiastic members who are keen to get involved in the activities of the Subcommittee. The main tasks are to set up and manage the accounts in some of the major Social Media (i.e., Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Second Life, etc.) and to pursue suggestions for using Social Media to other parties of CIS. Experience in programming in Facebook and Second Life is preferred.

We believe you may have experience in and use one or more Social Media on a regular basis. To be a Subcommittee member, you will just need to spare some of your time working with Social Media for CIS. You will provide valuable experience in committee membership and society involvement that could be useful on your CV, or as a stepping-stone towards further CIS technical committee involvement.

Being a member will require enthusiasm, dedication and the investment of some of your time for meetings, preparing documents for initiatives, and managing the CIS Social Media activities. As the Chairs of the IEEE CIS Social Media Subcommittee, we would like to invite any interested IEEE CIS members worldwide to join us.

If you are interested in joining this Social Media Subcommittee and further promoting your professional careers, please send your CV to us (cis.socialmedia@gmail.com) with email subject title “[SMS] Recruitment 2012” before January 28, 2012.

If you are not interested in joining the Subcommittee but are keen to provide input and feedback on CIS initiatives for Social Media, please also contact us.

We would appreciate it if you could forward this call to any IEEE CIS members who may be interested.

We look forward to hearing from you. Thank you very much for your attention.

Best Regards,

Albert Y.S. Lam

Chair, IEEE CIS Social Media Subcommittee

http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~ayslam/

Reminder: paper deadline for ICCCI 2012

A reminder that the deadline for papers submitted to the 4th International Conference on Computational Collective Intelligence (ICCCI) 2012 is 15 April 2012. This conference will be held in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, 28-30 November, 2012.

Reminder: paper submission deadline for ISICA 2012

A reminder that the deadline for papers submitted to the International Symposium on Intelligence Computing and Applications (ISICA) 2012 is 15 April 2012. This conference will be held in Wuhan, China, 27-28 October, 2012.

Reminder: paper submission deadline for CBR-MD 2012

A reminder that the deadline for submitting papers to the International Workshop Case-Based Reasoning (CBR-MD) 2012 is 13 April 2012. This workshop will be held in Berlin, Germany, 20 July 2012.

Reminder: conference paper deadline for EANN

A reminder that the deadline for submitting papers to the 13th International Conference on Engineering Applications of Neural Networks (EANN 2012) is 31 March 2012. This conference will be held in London, UK, 20-23 September, 2012.

Reminder: paper submission deadline for UCNC 2012

A reminder that the deadline for submitting papers to the 11th Conference on Unconventional Computation and Natural Computation (UCNC) 2012 is 26 March 2012. This conference will be held in Orleans, France, 3-6 September, 2012.

Reminder: paper submission deadline for IEEE CISDA 2012

A reminder that the deadline for papers submitted to the IEEE Workshop on Computational Intelligence for Security and Defence Applications (IEEE CISDA) 2012 is 19 March 2012. This workshop will be held in Ottawa, Canada, 11-13 July 2012.