Are you an academic? You're right that their arms are being twisted. I can't have an academic career and not publish in closed journals. I hate it and I don't know what I can do about it. If I only publish in open access journals I'm just offering my career up as a meaningless sacrifice.
No longer an academic, but as a student I always appreciated it when authors put their own work on their own websites as a form of common man's dissent. I have done the same with my own meagre two publications, for which IEEE and ACM (or probably Elsevier and friends) charge up to $31 each.
Ironically, due to the closed nature of their websites and the fact that the PDFs on my websites have since been indexed by various 3rd party research portals, they now far outrank the official (paywalled) versions on the ACM and IEEE websites.
Seriously, thanks for doing that. It's a wonderful feeling to search for the title of a paper and have the first result be a PDF link to an academic or personal site rather than a springerlink/JSTOR/citeseer result.
Citeseer is an open indexer, collecting files from the web and making them openly available. Many of those PDF links you mention are the sources for its index.
It is nothing like Springer, Elsevier, ScienceDirect, Thompson, ... websites. Please don't lump them together.
You're right, I didn't mean to imply that they're all the same. It's just that when a PDF is openly available, it's often one of the first results, so seeing citeseer is a bad sign. I seem to remember them creating pages for citations they didn't have a download link for but now I can't find any examples so I may be misremembering.
Never did any research worth publishing in a journal. Working a 9 to 5 job now and no longer have the opportunity to research. But I would have done it your way if I could have. An alternative now for me would be to help build open journals. The authors do the research, the publishers are simply a medium. Doesn't make sense for mediums to bite the hands of authors.
Thanks, am in a similar position now. Open journals are tricky though. I would like to think that there is a way for universities to somehow self-fund platforms for peer reviewed publications, but it just isn't happening. They keep paying huge subscription fees to the publishers of established journals with a reputation and history that is difficult to replace. It's a pretty perverse system, especially if you consider that in many countries universities are funded with public money, but I don't see it changing any time soon unless that change comes from within.
Well at least you can also upload your paper on arxive.org. But I agree, the closed journal is required for the reputation because they are peer reviewed.
(Not sure if they have some policy forbidding to disclose the paper on arxive etc. But I don't think so, the department I did my thesis, most papers were also available on arxive.org)
Most of the major publishers do now allow that kind of "self-archiving" on personal homepages and preprint repositories like arXiv. At least, IEEE, ACM, Springer, and Elsevier do, some of them as of fairly recently.
I've also self-archived some stuff that didn't formally permit it, and haven't heard a complaint. Given publishers' current political interests, I think it's pretty low-risk: I don't think publishers want the publicity that would come from suing an academic for posting a version of his own paper.
