51–60 of 107 posts
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…
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> 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…
As an example, Pandoc can already handle 90% of this type of workflow by itself (converting Latex to various XML formats). An open source project shared among a few universities or developed by single body like the ACM and used among dozen's of publications and fields. Even two or three full time people working on this would cost much less than $1M per year.
I 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…
Does "standards" mean things like these?
WiFi: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11
Floating point: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_754
Those types of standards seem pretty important.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> and $38.5M/year on "standards" (!?) Does "standards" mean things like these? WiFi: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11 Floating point: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_754 Those types of standards seem pretty important.
Still, $38.5M/year?
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…
I'm curious why twitter is inaccessible from your machine.
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I'm curious why twitter is inaccessible from your machine.
From "intentionally" I would guess a social network DNS blocklist that he self-configured, although it could also be a workplace policy.
Compared to hacker news, my main issues with twitter are a much lower signal-to-noise ratio, lack of prioritization over time windows—if I take a day/week/month away from hacker news, it’s easy to catch up on the top things I missed at https://hn.algolia.com —lack of depth in content, and pervasive tracking across other sites including through t.co.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
I'm not sure how it works at ACM, but often, it's people retyping the contents of your article into a JATS-XML template and adding additional metadata (authors, date of publication, perhaps who funded it, etc.), which is then used to generate several outputs (e.g. PDF, HTML, but also citation lists, etc.).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_Article_Tag_Suite
>LaTeXML is a free, public domain software, which converts LaTeX documents to XML, HTML, EPUB, JATS and TEI.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeXML
The wonderful thing about standards is that there are so many of them. And each one has variations.
Money really seems to be wasted for the most part, and the digital library has always been an embarrassment. Years later, it still has no API, and last I checked the terms of service forbid you from accessing it with software! Completely braindead.
The only reason to join ACM besides accessing the crappy digital library is to save money on conference registration fees, which are outrageous because of what the venues usually charge and get away with.
Usenix seems (to me at least) to be better run and had open access policies years before ACM. But the IEEE is largely a cesspool as well, charging absurd fees for digital library access, and sponsoring a number of spamferences.
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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 & Professio…
(I agree with you just possibly a poor example)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> and $38.5M/year on "standards" (!?) Does "standards" mean things like these? WiFi: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11 Floating point: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_754 Those types of standards seem pretty important.
Now that you mention it, probably, yes. Still, $38.5M/year?