This has been repeated ad nauseum by others, but it seems I'll have to repeat it again:

ALL lenses made for Pentax SLRs (film or digital) work with Pentax digital SLRs (no adapters needed). This is not true for Olympus, Nikon or Canon. If you bought a Pentax lens 30 years ago, it'll work right out of the box on a Pentax DSLR.

So it just seems silly that so many people replying to his post keep pointing out lens compatibility. Pentax is king in this regard.

Sorry, but utter BS.

I was once part of a photography club. The members would regularly have internal competitions. The winning entries were more often than not from high quality non-DSLRs. The photographers had years of experience, owned DSLRs, but ultimately found smaller cameras to be more convenient.

Technical aspects (camera features, optics, etc) do help, but they are merely one reason among many that you get good photos. Other factors are opportunity, photographer skill, and yes, the number of photos you take.

As someone once said:

If you're buying a camera that will reduce the likelihood of you taking photos, then you're likely going to get fewer good photos than with an inferior camera with which you take a lot more photos.

To get to the rest of your comment:

Many non-DSLR's offer raw. This isn't 2001.

First, almost all good point and shoots offer TIFF. When I bought my first digital point and shoot in 2001, all the "good" cameras offered uncompressed TIFFs.

But that's all irrelevent because: A TIFF format is almost useless. You simply have a huge file with no lossy compression. This does not give you the extra manipulation headroom that you get with RAW. The benefits of RAW do not carry over to TIFFs.

Not true. Uncompressed TIFFs have less information than RAW.

Seriously, how did this comment get moderated up?

ACM and IEEE institution subscription fees are not as outrageous the major culprits (Elsevier, etc). That's generally true for professional organizations - they charge universities considerably less, and are more receptive to feedback from them. Usually when universities complain about the costs, they're not complaining about ACM or IEEE

Yes, but wouldn't you agree that the IEEE (and probably the ACM) are not being too unreasonable by allowing you to publish the proof/preprint? As you yourself noted, it's as good as the final version.

OK - Now you're just being stupid.

Explain why my adviser would complain about paying for open access journals, and comment that normal journals don't ask for money, while paying for money in normal journals.

I'm well aware of it, and it's completely irrelevant. We're discussing if one has to pay to publish, not if one has to pay to subscribe.

Either you're submitting to an open access journal (or something similar (e.g. PubMed)), or want special treatment (e.g. color), or it's a sleazy journal, or things are just wildly different in your discipline than in physics and IEEE.

Mind you: I dealt only with journals published by a professional organization (IEEE, ACM, APS, etc). Perhaps some journals published by private companies (Springer/Elsevier) may require payment, but I don't think it's common for the "good" journals.

There's a reason why a lot of academics state that they think open access will fail: It's because the latter requires payment whereas the traditional journals most academics publish in don't.

Perhaps you didn't bother reading my earlier messages.

I didn't pay.

My adviser didn't pay. The one time he was asked to pay for publication, it was because he had submitted to an open access journal. When he found out they required money, he remarked that the open access model's going to fail because they require money whereas the traditional ones don't.

If you paid, then either:

• You submitted to an open access journal. This may be common in the medical/biology sector.
• You wanted special treatment (e.g. color images).
• You got duped and submitted to a sleazy journal.

In the journals I've published in, the two are the same.

And given the context of the discussion, the version the IEEE allows you to publish is almost the proof. From the complainer's own page, he links to the FAQ, where it says:

And the first question in the FAQ is:

This isn't the final formatted version, but the version that is final in content. No more revisions will be made. It is the one accepted by peer review, and is for all practical purposes as good as the published one.

Granted, the FAQ does define a preprint to be the one prior to submission, which conflicts with my usage, but then the complainer is factually incorrect in saying that the IEEE only allows preprints.

The fact, however, remains that the IEEE allows you to publicly post the final revision after peer review.

So we're in agreement. It just seems silly to whine that you can't publish the final formatted paper, when you can publish one as good as it.

Perhaps in some journals, but not in IEEE, which is one of the two he was complaining about:

From the IEEE submission guidelines:

Emphasis mine.

They send you the proof (which is the preprint) after all the refereeing is done and any changes the referees suggest have been implemented.

From the IEEE submission guidelines:

Emphasis mine.

So you'd advocate non-anonymous referees?

I don't know why the second link is really upset about the preprint policy. In fact, not long ago being allowed to put preprints on a public server was considered a victory.

For those who don't know, a preprint is not the version you submitted to the journal, but the version just prior to publication: After the peer review, after the formatting, and after all corrections. It's the one they send to the author saying, "This is how your paper will look - do a a quick glance to see if you find any errors." It's almost always identical to the final paper that is published.

So if they allow preprints, then it's as good as the final paper. To complain that they don't allow the final paper is just whining.

Because Digg and Reddit have taught me that often the top rated items are of poor quality, and that most really good submissions/comments don't get notably high in the rankings.

Ratings is a popularity metric, not a quality metric.

I don't, and while some perhaps do, I suspect most of the moderately prestigious ones don't. At least not the main ones in physics or IEEE.

When I was in grad school, if someone told my advisor that a fee would be charged for publication, he'd give them an earful and publish elsewhere. And it's quite telling that he never did this because he was never asked for a fee.

All papers whose work was funded by the NIH is required to be open access.

NIH is probably the exception. I think as of yet, most DARPA and NSF grants don't require open access. If they do, they must not enforce it because most people I know get their funding from them and not one of their papers is open access.