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Created January 21, 2014 21:23
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Email to the International Speech Communication Association on making the ISCA archive Open Access.
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isca-open-access-opinion.md

Dear Martin Cooke,

thanks for bringing up the issue of open access for ISCA archive (http://www.isca-speech.org/iscapad/iscapad.php?module=article&id=6070), something I have heard people – myself included – complaining about regularly.

From an author’s and reader’s perspective, I do not see a single reason for having a closed members-only ISCA archive. Here are some arguments for an ISCA archive that is open to everyone (there are of course many more):

  • Currently ISCA archive is only accessible for ISCA members. Working in an interdisciplinary field (artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, speech science, linguistics) many of my colleagues who are potentially interested in my work have no interest in becoming an ISCA member because speech science and speech technology is not their field of research. Accessing my ISCA papers is not possible at all for them.

  • Is the right to self-archive the preprint – or even the official version – of Interspeech papers granted by ISCA (on personal websites or in institutional repositories)? Or is self-archiving of ISCA publications only tolerated? Or not even that? Currently self-archiving authors seems to be in legal limbo and it would be great if this issue would be clarified once and for all. Ideally by granting all rights of ISCA publications to the authors under a Creative Commons CC-BY license (as convincingly argued by Stuart M Shieber http://dash.harvard.edu/handle/1/10121960).

  • Touching on this issue, it would be much better, if authors could simply link to the official version of publications in the ISCA archive that contain page numbers, conference name, place and logo. ISCA publications would be much easier to cite then.

  • Even as an ISCA member it is annoying to be prompted for one’s password every time one wants to access a paper in ISCA archive.

I guess that from ISCA’s perspective, the greatest concern for an open archive is that the number of members would decrease. This will certainly be the case. The question however is whether ISCA operates its archive to draw in new members and earn money, or to disseminate the results of its members’ research and broaden the impact that this research has (also in other fields). I think the latter would be a real service to its members. ISCA is not a company that needs to increase its revenue or its earnings.

I would welcome an open ISCA archive. The earlier the better. And while you are at it: convert Speech Communication to an open access journal as well (as the ACL has done with Computational Linguistics).

Best regards

Hendrik Buschmeier

-- Hendrik Buschmeier

Sociable Agents Group, CITEC, Bielefeld University

http://www.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de/~hbuschme/

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