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Comment by IgorPartola | Hacker News Reader

Is there some reason you can't both publish your research on your own site as well as in whatever publication you send it to? We could run that sort of "dual stack" until self-publishing becomes the standard.

I think a lot of the concepts from traditional publishing can be translated to this sort of online publishing. Once again, I think if it was easier for a researcher to self-publish and get peer reviews then to go through an old school publisher, then they would do it.

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One reason is that some journals require you to transfer copyright to them as a condition for publication. Usually, the journals then license the paper back to the corresponding author for limited personal distribution, but sometimes it may be the case that posting your research on your website would be a violation of copyright.

For an example, here's the transfer form for the American Chemical Societies journals: http://pubs.acs.org/page/copyright/journals/index.html (the ACS has historically been one of the bigger roadblocks, along with Elsevier, to more OpenAccess reform).

IEEE has a similar copyright assignment requirement. If you want your paper in an IEEE venue (which includes many of the top engineering, robotics, signal processing, etc. conferences and journals) you are not allowed to publish it anywhere else, including on your own web site. Institutions pay big bucks to subscribe to IEEE Xplore for online access.

Many people work around this by self-hosting a very similar paper, rendered from the same LaTeX sources, but without the IEEE chrome. IEEE usually turns a blind eye.

This is not completely true. "Authors and/or their employers shall have the right to post the accepted version of IEEE-copyrighted articles on their own personal servers or the servers of their institutions or employers without permission from IEEE..." [1]. They also allow preprints on personal sites. The other major publishing organization in CS, ACM, has a similar policy.

[1] https://www.ieee.org/documents/ieeecopyrightform.pdf

That's interesting, I didn't know that clause. It looks like they explicitly allow posting the "accepted version", with the addition of the copyright attribution to the IEEE (i.e. not actually the version I wrote that they accepted!). Most people don't bother with that, and the IEEE hasn't hassled anyone I know about omitting the notice.

However, you are definitely not allowed to post the IEEE rendered version.

I extend your quote from your cited source:

"6. Personal Servers. Authors and/or their employers shall have the right to post the accepted version of IEEE-copyrighted articles on their own personal servers or the servers of their institutions or employers without permission from IEEE, provided that the posted version includes a prominently displayed IEEE copyright notice and, when published, a full citation to the original IEEE publication, including a link to the article abstract in IEEE Xplore. Authors shall not post the final, published versions of their papers."

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