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ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs

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Re: ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs

#31

Post by Rochus »

Isn't this a typical case of Parkinson's law?

See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law (didn't find a free version of the book unfortunately).

There is even a fitting example in the book where Parkinson describes how the administration of the British Navy became bigger and bigger although there were fewer and fewer ships to manage. In the present case, one would have to assume analogously that with the introduction of the Internet and the advancing automation, considerable costs were eliminated.

So the question is: have ACM and the other mentioned organizations already reached the tertiary and last stage of INJELITITIS?

Re: ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs

#33

Post by chrisseaton »

elehack wrote: post #26

There'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…

> their publication templates and publication workflow, to ensure greater consistency in publication formatting, improve accessibility, and archive publications in more future-proof formats

Publication workflow, formatting and accessibility? For every paper I’ve done I just send the ACM a final PDF produced myself from a LaTeX template that hasn’t changed in years. What’s the workflow for taking an already final PDF from authors and uploading it to a file server?

Re: ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs

#34

Post by FireBeyond »

DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #28
chrisseaton wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Around here in the emergency medicine field we have a Norma Pancake and a Dr Waffle.

Re: ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs

#35

Post by tensor »

chrisseaton wrote: post #25
drallison wrote: post #2

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. 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.

Not to defend the price differential, but someone has to solicit reviewers and manage the review process. This is going to roughly track the number of submissions and isn't free.

Re: ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs

#36

Post by chrisseaton »

tensor wrote: post #35
chrisseaton wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Not to defend the price differential, but someone has to solicit reviewers and manage the review process. This is going to roughly track the number of submissions and isn't free.

> someone has to solicit reviewers and manage the review process

Lol that’s done by volunteer community members as well. It literally is free to the ACM (but the people are paid to do it by their institutions as part of their jobs.)

Re: ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs

#37

Post by elehack »

jph00 wrote: post #27
elehack wrote: post #26

There'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.

I agree. I have no idea what IEEE is doing that costs that much. And while I don't take as hard a line against them as I do against Elsevier, I have never published with them and don't currently have any plans to change that.

Re: ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs

#38

Post by elehack »

chrisseaton wrote: post #33
elehack wrote: post #26

There'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…

> their publication templates and publication workflow, to ensure greater consistency in publication formatting, improve accessibility, and archive publications in more future-proof formats Publication workflow, formatting and accessibility? For every paper I’ve done I just send the ACM a final PDF produced myself from a LaTeX template that hasn’t changed in years. What’s the workflow for taking an already final PDF…

That workflow has changed in the last few years.

- Brand new templates (introduced about 5 years ago, the LaTeX template has had multiple updates per year since then)

- Workflow that makes use of the source (or possibly codes the source embeds in the PDF, but you have to provide LaTeX source to ACM these days)

- Papers now render in both PDF and HTML (and the HTML looks quite good), this started showing up within the last 1-2 years

- Papers are archived in an XML-based format (something called JITS, I do not know details) to facilitate rendering to PDF, HTML, ePub, and other formats not yet devised

Re: ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs

#39

Post by jcranmer »

elehack wrote: post #26

There'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…

I'm not sure how many articles are published a year in ACM [1], but the answer seems to be a few 10,000s. That's a per-article publishing cost of a few hundred dollars, which is not unrealistic to me.

[1] The ACM Digital Library claims 2.8 million published over 84 years, or about 33,000/year if divided equally over the years (which is laughably false). Some number of that quantity may include citations for keynotes or posters, which aren't really research papers, but I don't have a good handle on that rate.

Re: ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs

#40

Post by alynn »

One great thing about a $99/year ACM membership is that it includes full access to the O’Reilly service formerly known as Safari Books, normally $499/year. I have no idea what the volume pricing on Safari subscriptions is, so can only say there’s a possibility that ACM article sales subsidize Safari books; I do know that, as an individual who has to learn new things and look old things up constantly, the inclusion of O’Reilly/Safari makes an individual ACM subscription a fantastic deal.

Additionally, having seen someone organize an academic conference once, I do know that IEEE provides a conference with things like bank accounts, insurance, and purchasing departments that can meet the creditworthiness requirements of major hotels. It also ends up covering the shortfall if the conference winds up losing money.

I’m all for improving efficiencies where possible, and there are definitely some problems with these organizations, don’t get me wrong; but I did want to emphasize that both organizations are definitely providing real value to parts of the computing community.

Disclaimer: I haven’t read the link as twitter is (intentionally) inaccessible from my machine.

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