Not Elsevier, this time. The rumor is that SAGE Publications, the corporate publisher of the journal Political Theory, have bypassed the journal's editorial board and unilaterally imposed a new editor. As one commenter (6/17 6:44 on the first thread below) states, "The idea that the editorship of the journal is to be determined directly by them, apparently with no formal consultation with members of the existing editorial community, is like the idea of a faculty search being run by a couple of corporate honchos from a University's Board of Trustees, without consultation with current members of the faculty of the relevant department."

See here, here, and here for discussion, but so far (despite a signed statement by one of the editorial board members) there's a lot more heat than light.

Via Michael Nielsen: Don't Ask, Don't Tell: Rights Retention for Scholarly Articles. My mother, a poet, thinks it very strange when she hears about the system of scientific publishing in which we give away the copyrights for all our papers. In poetry, the authors retain their copyrights, and give permission to publishers to publish their poems; the same is true in fiction writing. The system works without problems: it doesn't prevent publishers from going after people who illicitly copy their works, and it doesn't prevent them from getting exclusive publication rights to the works in question. So what, exactly, do we gain by giving away our copyrights? What we lose is the right to distribute our own works online for free; but as this Harvard Law blog post observes, many of us do that anyway, hoping that the publishers won't demand that we take them down again or sue us for noncompliance with their contracts. And mostly it works, but there's always that risk...

Fortunately, there is a solution: free online journals. The Journal of Graph Algorithms and Applications and the new Journal of Computational Geometry both are free as in free beer (no cost to access the papers, no publication fees) but also free in the sense that authors retain copyright and grant the publisher a license to print the paper. Therefore, I am happy to echo Suresh and Ernie Jeff and announce that JoCG is now open for business and accepting submissions.

One question I had with the new journal was, if it's online-only, how permanent are its archives? If whoever's running the journal gets hit by a bus, what happens to all the old papers? In today's business climate one should wonder about that for commercial journals too, I suppose. JGAA has been handling the issue by collecting its old issues into printed volumes, but as I understand it that arrangement has run into difficulties, so I was curious to hear what JoCG intended. Anyway, the answer is that they're using the Open Journal Systems software and LOCKSS data security model, in which university libraries maintain local copies of open content in order to assure its permanence. So I am greatly reassured on that front.

Therefore, as Samir exhorts us, get those SoCG papers into a journal. And now that we finally have a noncommercial alternative to DCG, CGTA, and IJCGA, let's support it by sending our papers there.

Via GMBM: Blogger served with takedown notice for citing a journal article (and using a clip of some graphed data from the article as part of the citation). Do you want your publishers preventing people from talking about your own articles?

ETA: Wiley backs down

Via Shakespeare's Sister: The Associated Press feels that copying and pasting text from blogs without attribution doesn't count as plagiarism. It's only "real" media that deserve credit for their writing. That attitude would explain some of the instances of academic dishonesty we've seen from some of our students...

Real scones were provided at the first morning tea and coffee break at Graph Drawing. The rest of the breaks had biscuits instead, so I pined after the scones for the rest of the conference. The plastic-wrapped rubber imitations in the dorm breakfast baskets did not satisfy, though I saw someone else bought some to bring back. Why is it so difficult to find real scones in the US? And why do people think those baking-powder-flavored chunks of concrete you can get at Starbucks in any way resemble scones?

Found out today (via Neil Gaiman) that Kepler's is closing. I no longer live near Menlo Park, but I'd shopped there many times. One less good independent bookstore in the world. One more step towards the complete domination of our culture by corporate homogeneity.