Is arxiv.org mirrored on archive.org? The latter has its Wayback Machine of course, but that might not necessarily follow .ps and .pdf links.
Wayback Machine crawls files as well as pages.
ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs
11–20 of 107 posts
Re: ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs
#12This post makes no sense. ArXiv is a site to which papers are posted. ACM and IEEE are technical societies with a range of publications professionally managed, peer reviewed, and edited. They serve different needs and have--surprise surprise--different costs.
> This post makes no sense. ArXiv is a site to which papers are posted. ACM and IEEE are technical societies with a range of publications professionally managed, peer reviewed, and edited
I have been a reviewer of many ACM, Elsevier etc. conferences. The reviewers, editors don't get any money for their service. Regardless, "professional management" is not a sufficient argument for 33x / 190x the price difference . IEEE annual spend $92M in people costs and I doubt a single $ of it goes to any of these peer reviews or editors.
Re: ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs
#13This post makes no sense. ArXiv is a site to which papers are posted. ACM and IEEE are technical societies with a range of publications professionally managed, peer reviewed, and edited. They serve different needs and have--surprise surprise--different costs.
They don't pay for peer review. I'm not sure you mean by "professionally managed" or "edited" exactly - or why that would cost over $100m. (Disclaimer: I wrote the tweet. Although I didn't expect it to appear on HN...)
Thanks Jeremy for highlighting this issue.
A lot of scientific publishers have hijacked "Open Access" to charge high fees for the same publication as before and pocket more money. For example, "Springer Blood Cancer Journal" charges $ 4,580 as OA fees. I can't imagine how one can rationalize that cost.
Re: ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs
#14What are the costs here... 25M downloads per month doesn't seem like it should cost $100k per month. Must be total archive size I imagine?
Re: ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs
#15I wrote this tweet. Wasn't sure anyone would read it - glad it's got noticed, because I do think it's an important issue!
I'd love to know where that money at IEEE and ACM is going. The annual reports don't make it at all clear, unfortunately. Obviously, there are for-profit publishers where the money is simply going to huge profit margins. But that's not the case for professional societies.
One thing I noticed when I had to sign up to ACM for a conference a few years ago was that I got harangued by sales-people from ACM for months afterwards, trying to get me on a call to have me buy more expensive memberships. It wasn't an automated system - it was an actual person, trying to get me onto an actual phone call with them. It occurred to me at the time that that must be very expensive, yet it's still a profitable thing for them to do - so there's clearly a lot of money changing hands...
I don't think this is a good sign. Perhaps the professional societies can openly publish a full breakdown of what they're spending money on?
Re: ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs
#16I wrote this tweet. Wasn't sure anyone would read it - glad it's got noticed, because I do think it's an important issue! I'd love to know where that money at IEEE and ACM is going. The annual reports don't make it at all clear, unfortunately. Obviously, there are for-profit publishers where the money is simply going to huge profit margins. But that's not the case for professional societies. One thing I noticed when…
Thank you for tweeting this.
I'm making my way through the IEEE annual report to which you linked[a], and am dumbfounded too. Not only does the IEEE spend $193.4M/year operating "periodicals and media," they also spend $103.5M/year on "membership and public imperatives" (!?) and $38.5M/year on "standards" (!?). Note that these figures do not include the amounts spent on conferences, which are at least tangible.
Moreover, it looks like the organization has $523.8M in investments at fair value (p. 43) -- an endowment greater than that of the vast majority of US colleges and universities. Am I imagining things, or does the IEEE look a lot like "a small hedge fund attached to a professional organization?"
To put that last figure in perspective, if income and gains from the IEEE's investment portfolio are, say, at least 5%/year, they could fund all of arXiv.org's annual expenses 20 times over in perpetuity without dipping into capital.
Something smells rotten indeed.
[a] https://www.ieee.org/content/dam/ieee-org/ieee/web/org/corpo...
Re: ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs
#17(arxiv.org is not archive.org if someone wants to fix the title. both are absurd creations that can't possibly exist, though.)
Fixed. Thanks!
Re: ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs
#18This post makes no sense. ArXiv is a site to which papers are posted. ACM and IEEE are technical societies with a range of publications professionally managed, peer reviewed, and edited. They serve different needs and have--surprise surprise--different costs.
> surprise surprise--different costs
The surprise is NOT that the costs are different. The surprise is the order of magnitude of the difference. The surprise is also the absolute value of the cost of IEEE given it's apparent activity.
I have no idea if the massive spending on IEEE is reasonable given I have no insight into their org. I do agree the size of the costs as associated with the activities is suspicious.
Re: ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs
#19What are the costs here... 25M downloads per month doesn't seem like it should cost $100k per month. Must be total archive size I imagine?
This isn't insanely high given its traffic and that it's attached to an educational (not for profit) institution. They need developers, infrastructure, support, people to process the papers, etc...
Re: ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs
#20I wrote this tweet. Wasn't sure anyone would read it - glad it's got noticed, because I do think it's an important issue! I'd love to know where that money at IEEE and ACM is going. The annual reports don't make it at all clear, unfortunately. Obviously, there are for-profit publishers where the money is simply going to huge profit margins. But that's not the case for professional societies. One thing I noticed when…
Thank you for tweeting this. I'm making my way through the IEEE annual report to which you linked[a], and am dumbfounded too. Not only does the IEEE spend $193.4M/year operating "periodicals and media," they also spend $103.5M/year on "membership and public imperatives" (!?) and $38.5M/year on "standards" (!?). Note that these figures do not include the amounts spent on conferences, which are at least tangible. Moreo…
Another asset they have (and monetize) is a vast library of old papers. For instance, if you want to read Kildall's 1973 classic "A unified approach to global program optimization" then ACM will gladly let you do so... after you pay them $15.00 for the 8 page paper. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/512927.512945
It's hard to see how this is compatible with their claim to be "Advancing Computing as a Science & Profession".