# Those who know history find new ways to err

It is part of typesetting folklore that Donald Knuth was so upset on seeing the galley proofs of The Art of Computer Programming that he decided to write a computer program that followed the traditions of computer typesetting. And, hence, TeX was born.

For anyone who has to typeset math, TeX is the next best thing to sliced bread. I have been using TeX (in fact, LaTeX exclusively) to submit journal articles to IEEE journals. But it appears that in the race to become more adapted to online publishing, many journals are changing their publishing tools. And, in the case of IEEE, it appears that TeX is no longer in their tool chain.

I first noticed that something was amiss, when I was proof reading the galley proofs of a paper that was to appear in IEEE Transactions of Information Theory. I used \mathscr from the rsfs package to denote sets (as it is more ornate than \mathcal). The paper had an expression

\sum_{q \in \mathscr Q} ...


In the galley proof, the script Q in the subscript was of normalsize, rather than scriptsize. So, I pointed that out in my corrections. In the corrected version, the script Q was of a size between normalsize and scriptsize, which a comment from the typesetter that “we cannot make it smaller”. It is at that time that I realized that they were not using TeX. In fact, all mathematical symbols were inserted as images, which has two consequences:

1. It throws accessibility out of the window. These days I read most papers on my iPad. It is a pain to annonate images (normal tools like highlight, underline, do not work with images).
2. It increases the file size by a factor of 10. Just take a look at the average filesize for papers in the current issue (where the filesize is 2MB to 10MB) and early access papers (which are author preprints before they have been processed by the journal; for these the average filesize is 500-600kB).

Last month I went through another round of painful proof reading of galley proofs for a paper that is to appear in IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control. Again, all the math was converted to images, and the niceties of TeX, like the correct vertical location of : in \coloneqq were lost.

As an author, publishing in IEEE has become more painful for me (due to the typographic errors introduced by whatever software IEEE is using). As a reader, reading IEEE papers has become more painful for me (as I have to download papers that are 5x times bigger in size, and have math typeset as embedded images). Oh well, the irony of IEEE not accepting documents with Type 3 (bitmap) fonts is not lost on me.

This whole process makes me wonder, do we still need big publishers in this day and age of online publishing. Why should we, the authors that generate the content; the reviewers who verify it; the editors who carefully curtail it, offer our voluntary services to a big publisher like IEEE when we get nothing in return (no copy editing, no free open access). I wish I were in a field where I could publish exclusively with good publishers like SIAM and ACM (I have published once with SIAM; they actually copy edited the content and gave me the final TeX files when they were done), or in online journals like JMLR.

# A new publishing model for academia

Today I received two emails for an invitation to publish a book chapter in a new book project by SCIYO. This is what the email said (I blanked out some information and added emphasis)

Dear Dr.XXXX,

My name is XXXX XXXX and I am contacting you regarding the SCIYO new book project under the working title “XXXX”, XXX-XXX-XXXX-X-X.

Based on your paper “XXXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX”, you are invited to submit a proposal for the book chapter. You are however neither limited to the paper topic nor are we asking you to republish the above paper.

To enable free access to the worldwide scientific community, Sciyo charges a publication fee of 470 euro per chapter. Publishing fee covers the review process, complementary hard copy and an online edition of the book.

SCIYO is also the first open access academic publisher to pay author royalties based on the number of chapter downloads.

For further details and list of author benefits, please visit

http://www.sciyo.com/invitation/xxxx

I hope that you will accept to participate.

On behalf of SCIYO President XXXX XXXX,

Mrs XXXX XXXX

These were sent to different email addresses, and were soliciting the book chapter based on my two different publications. Both invitations were for the same book, and by the same person.

At first, I was excited to have been invited to submit a book chapter. Then I read the email carefully and realized that I have to pay 470 Euros to get the chapter published. Authors get royalties based on number of downloads (0.2 Euro per 100 downloads). My immediate reaction was that SCIYO is fraud— the Nigerian bank transfer for academic publications. I browsed through some of the published books, and the content is genuine. The book chapters have a more applied flavor than my research, but they contain genuine overview articles. However, I did not recognize any of the authors, even in the fields that I am familiar with.

Surprisingly, Google did not bring up too much information about these publishers. Just two posts: Pay to Play in the Economist and No Thanks in a blog post. In both the posts, someone from SCIYO replied that they are a genuine publisher and their business model is independent of the quality of publication.

Giving the lack of information on the web, this appears to be a recent phenomenon. Their website does not contain any useful information (where are they located, where to buy the books in physical form, the editorial board, etc.). In view of these factors, I will pass this offer. Nonetheless this is an interesting take on open publishing. Instead of making money from the customers, make money from the authors!

Edit 1: See Joe’s comment below. He wrote a chapter for them, paid the publication fee, but the chapter was never published.

Edit 2: After Joe’s comment there was a surge of comments in support of SCYIO. How do four authors, who had published with SCIYO, decide to comment on a month old post within 24 hours after a SCIYO representative replied to Joe’s comment? Make your own judgment on that.

Edit 3: See this blog post for an interview with SCYIO’s CEO