[Cryptography] **Copyright seizure approaching** SpaCCS 2019 CFP (10+SIs): The 12th International Conference on Security, Privacy and Anonymity in Computation, Communication and Storage

[John Gilmore]

Don't submit your paper to this conference!  When researchers refuse to
supply their papers to the publishers who extort monopoly fees from
academic librarians, they have found the easiest way to tear down these
monopolies.

If you submit any paper to this conference, you will be forced
to assign your entire copyright in the paper to "Springer Nature
Switzerland AG", now and forever, for their profit and your loss
and the public's loss (see below).

Jun Feng is a program chair.  He should know to warn authors that
the whole conference is a scam on academic authors, which steals their
copyrights in order to extract large fees from academic libraries.  But
perhaps he did not mention this because he's helping to run the scam.

I recommend publishing your work in Open Access conferences and journals
in which (1) you are free to retain your copyright and control your
rights, and (2) the public is free to read your paper without paying
exhorbitant fees to a walled-garden publisher that prevents public
access to your scholarship.  See
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_access .  For example, the USENIX
Association runs many respected conferences and does Open Access
publication of their proceedings (https://www.usenix.org/).  The Public
Library of Science journals are also Open Access
(https://www.plos.org/).  Open access publishing increases your impact,
because all potential readers can actually read your paper.  Many
funders and academic institutions *require* that your work be published
with open access, because they have seen how the academic publishing
monopoly has damaged academic libraries (and science in general).

For general info about the highly profitable scams around academic
publishing, see:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_publishing#Publishers_and_business_aspects

	John Gilmore

Details:

Jun Feng <junfeng989 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Papers must be clearly presented in English, must not exceed 14 pages (or
> up to 20 pages with the pages over length charge) in Springer LNCS format (
> https://www.springer.com/gp/computer-science/lncs/conference-proceedings-guidelines),

That page links to the deliberately misnamed "LNCS Consent to Publish
form":

  https://resource-cms.springernature.com/springer-cms/rest/v1/content/15433008/data/Contract_Book_Contributor_Consent_to_Publish_LNCS_SIP

which says:

  "Author hereby grants and assigns to Springer Nature Switzerland AG,
  Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland (hereinafter called
  Publisher) the exclusive, sole, permanent, world-wide, transferable,
  sub-licensable and unlimited right to reproduce, publish, distribute,
  transmit, make available or otherwise communicate to the public,
  translate, publicly perform, archive, store, lease or lend and sell
  the Contribution"... (and dozens more clauses grabbing every possible
  way for people to read your work)

  "The copyright in the Contribution shall be vested in the name of
  Publisher."

Stealing your copyright is significantly more than merely giving
"consent to publish" your paper.  So if you're the type who signed
whatever legalese they claim is "required", without reading it, you have
just had your work legally stolen from you, and you didn't even know it.