I would like to see a similar effort directed towards the IEEE and Acm publishing associations. They both leech off of publicly funded research and impede scientific and technological progress with their myriad paywalls.
They are professional organizations, not just publishers. As professional organizations, their primary goal is to support their members and the betterment of the field. They may not always have paywalls; unlike Elsivier, their organization exists for purposes other than getting money from publications.
It's not enough, but it's a start, and I'm hopeful. I am a member of both the ACM and IEEE, and I want both of these organizations to move to a fully open access model.
If their primary goal is to support members and the betterment of their field, then why are they impeding the sharing of information amongst said members and the public at large, not only with recent research but legacy papers from the 80s? My guess is that the organizations have evolved into self-serving fat bureaucratic fiefdoms.
Elsevier and other large publishers publish many journals on behalf of societies, so the distinction between the interests of professional organisations and publishers doesn't really work.
I think there is a clear distinction: Elsivier cannot go to an open access model, because it would cease to exist from lack of revenue, while the ACM and IEEE can continue to exist with an open access model because of membership dues.
FWIW, ACM has something called ACM Authorizer that enables authors to post links to their papers so that others can read them without paying any charges to ACM.
You can already post your articles yourself, the Authorizer just helps you plug into the DL bookkeeping. And what's the point? What value do we realy get from the Digital Library these days? Its a feature that requires critical mass to be useful, and the fact that it is exclusive means it will never have critical mass.
Check out the latest CACM article on the open access issue:
IEEE and ACM are supposedly democratic organisations. The way to change them is from the inside: get a core group of members on-side, put candidates up for election and start building support among the membership.
Reading around, there's at least some movement on the open-access front in the IEEE. IEEE allows authors to pay a hefty up-front free to make their paper "open-access" [1] and one of the candidates in the last election has the words "open-access" in his statement [2].
"Off of" is one of my pet peeves as well. Unfortunately, its usage is legitimate, if sometimes unpopular.
"Off of used to be standard in English; the MWDEU starts off with a Shakespearean usage [1592] and continues with Pepys [1668] and Bunyan [1678]. In the last century, they show it used by Hemingway, Faulkner, and Harry Truman, among others. So if it is making a comeback, it’s no harbinger of linguistic doom, just a return to form."
I guess my reasons are the same as those described in the link above, i.e. it is a matter of dialect, my own dialect of English doesn't use "off of" and it sounds ridiculous to my ears; it produces a similar reaction to being confronted with mis-use of there/their/they're.
However, English is a very ill-behaved language, and "off of" just happens to be one of its irritating aspects I'll have to put up with.
