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IEEE blows it on the Security & Privacy copyright agreement

February 10, 2012 by

Last June, I wrote about the decision at the business meeting of IEEE Security & Privacy to adopt the USENIX copyright policy, wherein authors grant a right for the conference to publish the paper and warrant that they actually wrote it, but otherwise the work in question is unquestionably the property of the authors. As I recall, there were only two dissenting votes in a room that was otherwise unanimously in favor of the motion.

Fast forward to the present. The IEEE Security & Privacy program committee, on which I served, has notified the authors of which papers have been accepted or rejected. Final camera-ready copies will be due soon, but we’ve got a twist. They’ve published the new license that authors will be expected to sign. Go read it.

The IEEE’s new “experimental delayed-open-access” licensing agreement for IEEE Security & Privacy goes very much against the vote last year of the S&P business meeting, bearing only a superficial resemblance to the USENIX policy we voted to adopt. While both policies give a period of exclusive distribution rights to the conference (12 months for USENIX, 18 months for IEEE), the devil is in the details.

For the IEEE, authors must assign “a temporary joint and undivided ownership right and interest in all copyright rights” to the IEEE, giving the IEEE an exclusive to distribute the paper for 18 months. Thereafter, the license “expires.”

Those quotation marks around “expires” are essential, because there’s language saying “IEEE shall nonetheless retain the sole and exclusive right to archive the Work in perpetuity” which sounds an awful lot to me like they’re saying that the agreement doesn’t actually expire at all. It just moves into a second phase. For contrast, USENIX merely retains a non-exclusive right to continue distributing the paper. That’s an essential difference.

There are some numbered carve-outs in the IEEE contract that seem to allow you to post your manuscript to your personal web page or institutional library page, but not to arXiv or anything else. (What if arXiv were to offer me a “personal home page service?” Unclear how this license would deal with it.) This restriction appears to apply in both the initial 18 month phase and the “in perpetuity” phase.

My conclusion: authors of papers accepted to IEEE Security & Privacy should flatly refuse to sign this. I don’t have a paper of my own that’s appearing this year at S&P, but if I did, I’d send them a signed copy of the USENIX agreement. That’s what the members agreed upon.

Disclosure: I am currently running for the board of directors of the USENIX Association. That’s because I like USENIX. Of all the venues where I publish, USENIX has been the most willing to break with traditional publishing models, and my platform in running for USENIX is to push this even further. Getting ACM and IEEE caught up to USENIX is a separate battle.

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ACM opens another hole in the paywall

October 24, 2011 by

Last month I wrote about Princeton University’s new open-access policy. In fact, Princeton’s policy just recognizes where many disciplines and many scholarly publishers were going already. Most of the important publication venues in Computer Science already have an open-access policy–that is, their standard author copyright contract permits an author to make copies of his or her own paper available on the author’s personal web site or institutional repository. These publishers include the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), Springer Verlag (for their LNCS series of conference proceedings), Cambridge University Press, MIT Press, and others.

For example, the ACM’s policy states,

Under the ACM copyright transfer agreement, the original copyright holder retains … the right to post author-prepared versions of the work covered by ACM copyright in a personal collection on their own Home Page and on a publicly accessible server of their employer, and in a repository legally mandated by the agency funding the research on which the Work is based. Such posting is limited to noncommercial access and personal use by others, and must include this notice both embedded within the full text file and in the accompanying citation display as well:

“© ACM, YYYY. This is the author’s version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in PUBLICATION, {VOL#, ISS#, (DATE)} http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/nnnnnn.nnnnnn”

But now the ACM is trying something new; a mass mailing from ACM’s Director of Publications explains,

ACM has just launched a new referrer-linking service. It is called the ACM Author-Izer Service. In essence, ACM Author-Izer enables you to provide a free access to the definitive versions of your ACM articles permanently maintained by ACM in its Digital Library by embedding the links generated by this service in your personally maintained home-page bibliographies.

With widespread usage of this service, the need to post your author-prepared versions should be alleviated; automatic indexers will point to the article in the DL rather than alternative versions hosted elsewhere without the promise of being permanently maintained.

The ACM has not removed the author’s right to self-post copies of the articles, but clearly the publisher wants to discourage that, and to be the only source for content. Furthermore, authors can use this only if they buy in to the ACM’s “Author Profile” page, a feature that ACM has been pushing but that I suspect most authors don’t bother with. It’s an interesting strategy to capture links, or to reduce the number of copies floating around outside the control of the ACM archive. Whether it works may depend, in part, on how difficult it is for authors to use. I suspect most authors won’t bother, but if you want to see some Author-Ized links in action, click here and then click on “A Theory of Indirection via Approximation.” (I can’t link directly from this article, because the ACM permits this service from only one Web address.)

Unlike some newspapers, which are suffering badly in the Internet age, major nonprofit scholarly publishers such as the ACM are in good financial health, with a diverse array of activities and revenue sources: membership dues, conferences, refereed journals, magazines, paid job-advertisement web sites, and so on. Still, there is a lot of experimentation about how to survive as a publisher in the 21st century, and this appears to be the latest experiment.

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Open Access to Scholarly Publications at Princeton

September 26, 2011 by

In its September 2011 meeting, the Faculty of Princeton University voted unanimously for a policy of open access to scholarly publications:

“The members of the Faculty of Princeton University strive to make their publications openly accessible to the public. To that end, each Faculty member hereby grants to The Trustees of Princeton University a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide license to exercise any and all copyrights in his or her scholarly articles published in any medium, whether now known or later invented, provided the articles are not sold by the University for a profit, and to authorize others to do the same. This grant applies to all scholarly articles that any person authors or co-authors while appointed as a member of the Faculty, except for any such articles authored or co-authored before the adoption of this policy or subject to a conflicting agreement formed before the adoption of this policy. Upon the express direction of a Faculty member, the Provost or the Provost’s designate will waive or suspend application of this license for a particular article authored or co-authored by that Faculty member.

“The University hereby authorizes each member of the faculty to exercise any and all copyrights in his or her scholarly articles that are subject to the terms and conditions of the grant set forth above. This authorization is irrevocable, non-assignable, and may be amended by written agreement in the interest of further protecting and promoting the spirit of open access.”

Basically, this means that when professors publish their academic work in the form of articles in journals or conferences, they should not sign a publication contract that prevents the authors from also putting a copy of their paper on their own web page or in their university’s public-access repository.

Most publishers in Computer Science (ACM, IEEE, Springer, Cambridge, Usenix, etc.) already have standard contracts that are compatible with open access. Open access doesn’t prevent these publishers from having a pay wall, it allows other means of finding the same information. Many publishers in the natural sciences and the social sciences also have policies compatible with open access.

But some publishers in the sciences, in engineering, and in the humanities have more restrictive policies. Action like this by Princeton’s faculty (and by the faculties at more than a dozen other universities in 2009-10) will help push those publishers into the 21st century.

The complete report of the Committee on Open Access is available here.

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Tinkering with the IEEE and ACM copyright policies

June 2, 2011 by

It’s historically been the case that papers published in an IEEE or ACM conference or journal must have their copyrights assigned to the IEEE or ACM, respectively. Most of us were happy with this sort of arrangement, but the new IEEE policy seems to apply more restrictions on this process. Matt Blaze blogged about this issue in particular detail.

The IEEE policy and the comparable ACM policy appear to be focused on creating revenue opportunities for these professional societies. Hypothetically, that income should result in cost savings elsewhere (e.g., lower conference registration fees) or in higher quality member services (e.g., paying the expenses of conference program committee members to attend meetings). In practice, neither of these are true. Regardless, our professional societies work hard to keep a paywall between our papers and their readership. Is this sort of behavior in our best interests? Not really.

What benefits the author of an academic paper? In a word, impact. Papers that are more widely read are more widely influential. Furthermore, widely read papers are more widely cited; citation counts are explicitly considered in hiring, promotion, and tenure cases. Anything that gets in the way of a paper’s impact is something that damages our careers and it’s something we need to fix.

There are three common solutions. First, we ignore the rules and post copies of our work on our personal, laboratory, and/or departmental web pages. Virtually any paper written in the past ten years can be found online, without cost, and conveniently cataloged by sites like Google Scholar. Second, some authors I’ve spoken to will significantly edit the copyright assignment forms before submitting them. Nobody apparently ever notices this. Third, some professional societies, notably the USENIX Association, have changed their rules. The USENIX policy completely inverts the relationship between author and publisher. Authors grant USENIX certain limited and reasonable rights, while the authors retain copyright over their work. USENIX then posts all the papers on its web site, free of charge; authors are free to do the same on their own web sites.

(USENIX ensures that every conference proceedings has a proper ISBN number. Every USENIX paper is just as “published” as a paper in any other conference, even though printed proceedings are long gone.)

Somehow, the sky hasn’t fallen. So far as I know, the USENIX Association’s finances still work just fine. Perhaps it’s marginally more expensive to attend a USENIX conference, but then the service level is also much higher. The USENIX professional staff do things that are normally handled by volunteer labor at other conferences.

This brings me to the vote we had last week at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (the “Oakland” conference) during the business meeting. We had an unusually high attendance (perhaps 150 out of 400 attendees) as there were a variety of important topics under discussion. We spent maybe 15 minutes talking about the IEEE’s copyright policy and the resolution before the room was should we reject the IEEE copyright policy and adopt the USENIX policy? Ultimately, there were two “no” votes and everybody else voted “yes.” That’s an overwhelming statement.

The question is what happens next. I’m planning to attend ACM CCS this October in Chicago and I expect we can have a similar vote there. I hope similar votes can happen at other IEEE and ACM conferences. Get it on the agenda of your business meetings. Vote early and vote often! I certainly hope the IEEE and ACM agree to follow the will of their membership. If the leadership don’t follow the membership, then we’ve got some more interesting problems that we’ll need to solve.

Sidebar: ACM and IEEE make money by reselling our work, particularly with institutional subscriptions to university libraries and large companies. As an ACM or IEEE member, you also get access to some, but not all, of the online library contents. If you make everything free (as in free beer), removing that revenue source, then you’ve got a budget hole to fill. While I’m no budget wizard, it would make sense for our conference registration fees to support the archival online storage of our papers. Add in some online advertising (example: startup companies, hungry to hire engineers with specialized talents, would pay serious fees for advertisements adjacent to research papers in the relevant areas), and I’ll bet everything would work out just fine.

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Federating the "big four" computer security conferences

April 6, 2011 by

Last year, I wrote a report about rebooting the CS publication process (Tinker post, full tech report; an abbreviated version has been accepted to appear as a Communications of the ACM viewpoint article). I talked about how we might handle four different classes of research papers (“top papers” which get in without incident, “bubble papers” which could well have been published if only there was capacity, “second tier” papers which are only of interest to limited communities, and “noncompetitive” papers that have no chance) and I suggested that we need to redesign how we handle our publication process, primarily by adopting something akin to arXiv.org on a massive scale. My essay goes into detail on the benefits and challenges of making this happen.

Of all the related ideas out there, the one I find most attractive is what the database community has done with Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment (see also, their FAQ). In short, if you want to publish a paper in VLDB, one of the top conferences in databases, you must submit your manuscript to the PVLDB. Submissions then go through a journal-like two-round reviewing process. You can submit a paper at any time and you’re promised a response within two months. Accepted papers are published immediately online and are also presented at the next VLDB conference.

I would love to extend the PVLDB idea to the field of computer security scholarship, but this is troublesome when our “big four” security conferences — ISOC NDSS, IEEE Security & Privacy (the “Oakland” conference), USENIX Security, and ACM CCS — are governed by four separate professional societies. Back in the old days (ten years ago?), NDSS and USENIX Security were the places you sent “systems” security work, while Oakland and CCS were where you sent “theoretical” security work. Today, that dichotomy doesn’t really exist any more. You pretty much just send your paper to the conference with next deadline. Pretty much the same community of people serves on each program committee and the same sorts of papers appear at every one of these conferences. (Although USENIX Security and NDSS may well still have a preference for “systems” work, the “theory” bias at Oakland and CCS is gone.)

My new idea: Imagine that we set up the “Federated Proceedings of Computer Security” (representing a federation of the four professional societies in question). It’s a virtual conference, publishing exclusively online, so it has no effective limits on the number of papers it might publish. Manuscripts could be submitted to FPCS with rolling deadlines (let’s say one every three months, just like we have now) and conference-like program committees would be assembled for each deadline. (PVLDB has continuous submissions and publications. We could do that just as well.) Operating like a conference PC, top papers would be accepted rapidly and be “published” with the speed of a normal conference PC process. The “bubble” papers that would otherwise have been rejected by our traditional conference process would now have a chance to be edited and go through a second round of review with the same reviewers. Noncompetitive papers would continue to be rejected, as always.

How would we connect FPCS back to the big four security conferences? Simple: once a paper is accepted for FPCS publication, it would appear at the next of the “big four” conferences. Initially, FPCS would operate concurrently with the regular conference submission process, but it could quickly replace it as well, just as PVLDB quickly became the exclusive mechanism for submitting a paper to VLDB.

One more idea: there’s no reason that FPCS submissions need to be guaranteed a slot in one of the big four security conferences. It’s entirely reasonable that we could increase the acceptance rate at FPCS, and have a second round of winnowing for which papers are presented at our conferences. This could either be designed as a “pull” process, where separate conference program committees pick and choose from the FPCS accepted papers, or it could be designed as a “push” process, where conferences give a number of slots to FPCS, which then decides which papers to “award” with a conference presentation. Either way, any paper that’s not immediately given a conference slot is still published, and any such paper that turns out to be a big hit can always be awarded with a conference presentation, even years after the fact.

This sort of two-tier structure has some nice benefits. Good-but-not-stellar papers get properly published, better papers get recognized as such, the whole process operates with lower latency than our current system. Furthermore, we get many fewer papers going around the submit/reject/revise/resubmit treadmill, thus lowering the workload on successive program committees. It’s full of win.

Of course, there are many complications that would get in the way of making this happen:

  • We need a critical mass to get this off the ground. We could initially roll it out with a subset of the big four, and/or with more widely spaced deadlines, but it would be great if the whole big four bought into the idea all at once.
  • We would need to harmonize things like page length and other formatting requirements, as well as have a unified policy on single vs. double-blind submissions.
  • We would need a suitable copyright policy, perhaps adopting something like the Usenix model where authors retain their copyright while agreeing to allow FPCS (and its constituent conferences) the right to republish their work. ACM and IEEE would require arm-twisting to go along with this.
  • We would need a governance structure for FPCS. That would include a steering committee for selecting the editor/program chairs, but who watches the watchers?
  • What do we do with our journals? FPCS changes our conference process around, but doesn’t touch our journals at all. Of course, the journals could also reinvent themselves, but that’s a separate topic.

In summary, my proposed Federated Proceedings of Computer Security adapts many of the good ideas developed by the database community with their PVLDB. We could adopt it incrementally for only one of the big four conferences or we could go whole hog and try to change all four at once.

Thoughts?

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