Yesterday, comedian Chris Gethard wrote a long and poignant letter to an anonymous fan wrestling with depression and suicidal thoughts. A very interesting read:
From my understanding, the US requirement is due to Amazon Payments. It would be great if they could offer an alternative to those who are ineligible for Amazon's service. I'm not sure what incentive there is for Kickstarter to explore other options--they are likely happy to enjoy their current growth and success.
That said, as a backer of many Kickstarter campaigns from north of the border, it would be nice to be able to tap into their momentum with projects of my own.
You can still use Amazon Payments outside the US. Unfortunately, unlike PayPal, they bill you directly in the target currency which means your bank or credit card company may charge you fees - they did for me :(
I certainly do not. It is usually enough of a challenge to cover "overpage" charges that publishers charge when an accepted article runs over the "standard" length (usually 8 pages for a standard or regular article). Often times, the "extra" pages are introduced by additional text required to satisfy reviewers. One time I was requested to convert an 8 page article submitted as a regular paper into a short paper format (4 page limit), while adding a significant amount of new content. The result? A 7 page article that ended up costing $575 to publish. We won't even talk about charges for colour figures, which can run into the thousands.
Of course the money spent on overpage charges could be better spent on graduate student stipends, equipment purchases and maintenance, software licensing, attending conferences, and other expenses incurred by an active research program.
Other open journals, while still expensive, charge significantly less than what the IEEE is proposing. The challenge for academics is that, at least for now, IEEE journals are well regarded, well cited and considered to be a prestigious venue for publication.
The idea here is that the tend of thousands your library is paying now could be used to offset your costs to go the "Gold OA" route. With this discussion of fees, I have to point out that the majority of OA journals don't charge any fees at all, and of those that do their fees are generally comparable to the page charges you'd be paying at a non-OA journal.
It's only a rare few, like these guys, Nature Publishing, and a few others that charge so much. PLoS charges about half that.
Get yourself a password manager (such as 1Password) that will generate a unique password for every site and remember all of your login credentials for you. This has solved the problem for me.
I've noticed the same thing. While I understand the need to limit liability, I'm not happy about the bait and switch. I'm sure it doesn't build the goodwill that they were hoping for...
http://thechrisgethardshow.tumblr.com/post/31345619495/for-g...