Its a nonsense idea. The vanity press formerly known as peer-reviewed journals
have become virtually irrelevant for any purpose other than determining
academic tenure or award of research grants. If its not on the Web it is not
going to influence anyone else.
Charges that bear no relationship to the underlying costs are a nonsense that
will simply not fly. Publication fees in academic publishing are a racket on
top of a racket that is not going to last long.
Charging $5 to publish a document on the Web is not going to fly, still less
$500. Google will give you a blog for free and you can be pretty certain it
will be arround in a century or so. An internet draft is expired and deleted in
6 months.
If the cost of publication is a burden to the secretariat we need to look at
ways to reduce the cost. XML2RFC makes it much easier to move towards automated
publication.
________________________________
From: Thierry Ernst [mailto:thierry(_dot_)ernst(_at_)inria(_dot_)fr]
Sent: Tue 31/07/2007 9:22 AM
To: ietf(_at_)ietf(_dot_)org
Subject: Charging I-Ds
One notion might be to charge for publications of Internet Drafts. $500
for a draft name including five revisions and then $25 for each
additional revision. The rationale is that it is the draft
publications which create work for the entire IETF and the cost of that
work should be borne by those who want to see the work accomplished.
My understanding was that publishing the IDs today is mainly automatic
(at least with the new tools). Charging for publication of IDs will
essentially discourage people from doing so, which I think would be a
not-so-good effect.
In principle I would be against charging, but my experience of being a
chair makes me believe that many authors have no reason to publish
their I-D which are just a burden to the I-D secretariat and thus the
entire IETF community. In many occasions, I have seen new drafts been
announced by the secretariat, but not announced by the authors
themselves in the WG they were targeting. In several occasions I
emailed such authors to know more about their intention and many times
I didn't get any reply at all. The others replied pt-2-pt but never
announced their draft on the WG list (but they asked the chairs to do
so ;-). So, my conclusion is that in most cases these are students who
in their academic standards are required to show evidence of
publication. I'm not sure the IETF is designed for this. In the other
cases, prospective authors do not understand the IETF process, or are
to shy to advertise their work.
So, this proposition of charging could be refined as "pubishing I-Ds
that are not supported by any WG should be charged" or something
similar. Of course, WG drafts should be free of charge. Note that the
aim of this proposition would not to get more fund to the IETF, but to
relieve the IETF of the cost of processing drafts that are never read,
never discussed, and absolutely useless.
Thierry.
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