Taking someone's money to fund research and then not giving them access to that research is theft. If that money is tax money, I'd call it treason.
ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs
21–30 of 107 posts
Re: ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs
#22This 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.
It's fine to think that the IEEE cost is too high for the value provided, but there's no reason to measure it with respect to a baseline defined by the arXiv. The arXiv is literally just an automated system pushing bits around (plus some unpaid volunteers who do light moderating).
Likewise, I might think the person employed at the post office gets paid too much relative to the value they provide, but it would be silly to compare their salary cost to the maintenance cost of a blue steel Post Office box on the corner. ("Their health insurance alone costs 1000x the annual price of blue paint!")
Re: ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs
#23This 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.
You can host a peer-reviewed selection of papers as an "Overlay" over an open-access archive such as arxiv.org, at trivial cost. Closed-access journals don't even fund their peer-reviewers generally, so it's not like the "overlay" journal would be offering a worse deal from that POV.
Indeed, it costs very little to run a good quality journal and there's a growing network of them owned and managed by the scholarly community itself: https://freejournals.org/
Re: ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs
#24I 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…
Isn't the ACM run by the community for the community? Can we meet Pancake at a conference and ask her directly for clarification if the reports aren't detailed enough?
Re: ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs
#25This 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.
> publications professionally managed, peer reviewed, and edited
That's done by the community - ACM don't fund that. They just run the conferences (which are paid and ticketed so presumably fund themselves) and host the paper files.
Re: ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs
#26There's a lot to critique in publishing and associated costs, but this tweet is unfortunately factually wrong.
From the linked article, ACM's publication costs are $10.9M, not $33.7M.
One of the ACM's major publication initiatives over the last 3-5 years has been an overhaul of their publication templates and publication workflow, to ensure greater consistency in publication formatting, improve accessibility, and archive publications in more future-proof formats. There are also the ongoing costs of creating and indexing metadata (ACM tracks more metadata than arXiv, including resolved citations), preservation (ACM buys failsafe perpetual access services from Portico, arXiv has mirrors at other university libraries).
Should it cost $10.9M? I am not sure. Does it cost a lot more than what arXiv does? Yes.
For a costing exercise: the service ACM buys from Portico is archival and republication. If ACM goes insolvent, Portico flips on their archive and the content remains available. How would you price this service, knowing that when it is actually needed, it's because your customer can no longer pay bills, and you now need to take up their hosting (and all related costs) for approximately forever with no further revenue? I think a network of university libraries would be a more cost-effective way to provide this service, but it's the kind of thing that people working on publication and archival professionally think about, and that factors into the cost of professional archival-level publication.
(I cannot speak to IEEE.)
Re: ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs
#27There's a lot to critique in publishing and associated costs, but this tweet is unfortunately factually wrong. From the linked article, ACM's publication costs are $10.9M, not $33.7M. One of the ACM's major publication initiatives over the last 3-5 years has been an overhaul of their publication templates and publication workflow, to ensure greater consistency in publication formatting, improve accessibility, and arc…
Thank you for the correction.
IEEE's $193m is where we should focus our attention, when it comes to this expense line.
Re: ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs
#28I 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…
Isn't the ACM run by the community for the community? Can we meet Pancake at a conference and ask her directly for clarification if the reports aren't detailed enough?
FYI to save people some Googling...
I thought "Pancake" was an auto-correct mistake, because I'd never heard that surname before. But it really is the ACM president's surname.
Re: ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs
#29Taking someone's money to fund research and then not giving them access to that research is theft. If that money is tax money, I'd call it treason.
> Taking someone's money to fund research and then not giving them access to that research is theft.
That seems like hyperbole to me. I think it falls more into the category of "inequitable exchange" or "bad deal".
Re: ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs
#30This 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 . IE…
It's not just about professional management. I suspect IEEE and ACM have much more complicated infrastructure to handle submission, peer review, production, etc., which arXiv doesn't have. I'm not justifying the costs -- I wouldn't be able to do that unless I see the breakdown of costs, e.g., how much it goes to the society, how much it goes to post-production, etc. I would also assume that ACM and IEEE journals also do a bit of copy editing that goes beyond mere spell checks before publishing the articles. Although copy editing and post-production is generally outsourced, it is still expensive. All this adds to the cost.