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ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs

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Re: ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs

#61

Post by musicale »

musicale wrote: post #58

Usually when the budget is opaque there's a reason for it. 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 registra…

Actually I might stand corrected somewhat; if you want a Safari/O'Reilly subscription, ACM might be the way to do it?

However... I'd probably be in favor of unbundling this and other commercial services from ACM memberships.

Re: ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs

#62

Post by defen »

mhh__ wrote: post #59
jph00 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 just clicked it and downloaded the paper? (I agree with you just possibly a poor example)

If you're on a university or corporate network it's possible there is an org-level subscription that gives you "free" access to everything.

Re: ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs

#63

Post by murkt »

jph00 wrote: post #10
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.

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...)

They probably mean administration of a peer review. Someone has to find a suitable reviewer, which can be a bit time-consuming task [1], write to reviewers, just do all the coordination.

[1] There are now tools that automate and speed up finding peer reviewers, though, like https://www.prophy.science/referee-finder

Re: ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs

#64

Post by sigstoat »

earthboundkid wrote: post #60
cs702 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now that you mention it, probably, yes. Still, $38.5M/year?

Those are very expensive, although that only pushes the ripoff back one level, because why do they cost money at all?

because you have to run lots of meetings and pay technical editors to go over them, produce diagrams, etc?

i'm not arguing that any specific amount is appropriate, but "free" seems a little low.

Re: ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs

#65

Post by throwawayjava »

Causality1 wrote: post #21

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.

The big bucks are in patents, not in The Proceedings of the Fifth Annual ACM Intergalactic Conference on Subsubsubsfied.

Doing something about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act seems way more important than fixing publishing...

Re: ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs

#66

Post by covertlibrarian »

liamdiprose wrote: post #32

If its hosting costs the ACM is worried about, they could offer torrents as a free download option to lighten the load.

I imagine the vast majority of the digital library is included here:

http://libgen.is/scimag/repository_torrent/

80,700,000 articles as of today. These torrents contain every single article that's ever been accessed through sci-hub. Database dumps at http://gen.lib.rus.ec/dbdumps/ provide an index.

Re: ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs

#67

Post by williamDafoe »

sigstoat wrote: post #64
earthboundkid wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are very expensive, although that only pushes the ripoff back one level, because why do they cost money at all?

because you have to run lots of meetings and pay technical editors to go over them, produce diagrams, etc? i'm not arguing that any specific amount is appropriate, but "free" seems a little low.

I was secretary for IEEE 802.20. It is a volunteer position as is the chair position, but some evil company usually has the "independent" chair on its payroll (I'm looking at you, QUALCOMM). There are no paid editors draft standards are written by committee or companies as are change proposals (I have standardized many) and the chair usually merges the changes, for free. The only people paid at conferences are the registration people.

Re: ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs

#68

Post by aspaceman »

mhh__ wrote: post #59
jph00 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 just clicked it and downloaded the paper? (I agree with you just possibly a poor example)

Clicked at home and got the paywall. Pretty sure you're on a network with access.

Re: ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs

#69

Post by kragen »

elehack wrote: post #38
chrisseaton wrote: post #33

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…

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…

That sounds pretty counterproductive. So now authors, in addition to keeping up on their research, need to keep up on the updates to the ACM's LaTeX stylesheet? And there's every chance that the version that is formatted well with the ACM stylesheet when you initially submit will have formatting bugs six months later because the template got updated? And now you have a whole new toolchain to debug when the HTML version of your paper misaligns your tables? And maybe the HTML version that looks fine today will get mangled in 2028 after you retire and they update the CSS, as has happened with most of the New York Times articles?

It sounds like the ACM has a really different set of priorities than libraries and researchers do, one that values increasing headcount over guaranteeing permanence.

Re: ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs

#70

Post by kragen »

zozbot234 wrote: post #5

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.

ArXiv has historically been extremely hostile to crawlers, which is one of the reasons for its low costs.
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