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ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs

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Re: ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs

#81

Post by thawaway1837 »

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.

IEEE at our college would send a significant amount of money for the student org. In addition the student fee likely did not even cover the basic costs of access provided by third parties, etc.

They also have conferences, etc. to students, were the student fees almost certainly don’t cover the costs.

Their expenses may be too high, but the comparison to arxiv is not helpful.

Re: ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs

#82

Post by Dylan16807 »

kragen wrote: post #70
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.

Bah. If they average thousands of downloads per file, there's plenty of room in there for some crawlers.

And the total data set is less than a terabyte; seed a torrent somewhere for $20.

The user-pays S3 bucket also exists as a good thing but S3 is much more expensive than data needs to be.

Re: ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs

#83

Post by pygy_ »

FireBeyond wrote: post #34
DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This makes way more giddy than would be appropriate if I were to meet them in person.

Re: ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs

#84

Post by julierthanjulie »

jcranmer wrote: post #39
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…

Annual report 2019 gives some details - 34,000 full text articles were published in the DL. This will exclude non-archival content like keynotes, posters, etc if conference organisers provide correct metadata.

Re: ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs

#85

Post by denzil_correa »

Someone wrote: post #76
denzil_correa wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

PLOS ONE’s fee is $1,595. A factor of 3 doesn’t seem inexplainable to me. That’s “Springer Nature Blood Cancer Journal”, so factors of 1½ in “better editing”, “older, less efficient systems” and “fewer publications/year, so lower efficiency of scale” could already do it. Also, is Nature working on digitizing old content? That can be costly (I remember reading somewhere that it could involve a) finding a library that…

> PLOS ONE’s fee is $1,595. A factor of 3 doesn’t seem inexplainable to me.

You need to first explain why PLOS ONE is an appropriate baseline. A world class Open Access journal costs roughly $10 per submission [0]. Most arguments I have seen using PLOS ONE as a baseline, talk about the "non profit" part of PLOS. It has to be stressed here at that "non profit" doesn't mean PLOS works on a "non profit" business model. It just means that they generate profit AND the profit isn't distributed to its members, directors or officers [1].

[0] https://gowers.wordpress.com/2016/03/01/discrete-analysis-la...

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/non-profit_organizations

Re: ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs

#86

Post by Saigarich »

Certhas wrote: post #79
b215826 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We don't need to speculate how much it costs to run a world class journal. The cost above arxiv is 15$ per Submission: https://gowers.wordpress.com/2016/03/01/discrete-analysis-la... IEEE charges 1700$+

Correction, "Our total costs probably average about $30 per accepted article." https://discreteanalysisjournal.com/post/40 And that seems to be as bare bones as one can do, as they don't proofread and Scholastica is only used for peer review costing 10$ per submission.

Re: ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs

#87

Post by michaelt »

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.

$193 million would get you 1000 employees at $193,000 a head.

Even taking into account overheads like desk space and pensions, that's a very large number of very well paid employees for basic secretarial work like soliciting reviewers

Re: ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs

#89

Post by kragen »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #82
kragen wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Bah. If they average thousands of downloads per file, there's plenty of room in there for some crawlers. And the total data set is less than a terabyte; seed a torrent somewhere for $20. The user-pays S3 bucket also exists as a good thing but S3 is much more expensive than data needs to be.

They started in 1991, when a terabyte was an unimaginably huge quantity of data and it was common for anonymous FTP servers like xxx.lanl.gov to request that you not connect until after business hours to avoid interfering with the main purpose of the machines. When I joined the internet in 1992, our 7.5-MHz VAX had a 56-kbps frame-relay link to New Mexico Technet (TECNET on our DECNET), which I think may also have provided LANL's rather beefier internet connection. They started providing WWW access in 1993, before Apache added preforking to NCSA HTTPD, and in fact I think before NCSA HTTPD itself. This means that initially every new HTTP request involved forking a new child process from the HTTP server, which took a few hundred milliseconds. This is the context in which the arXiv's hostile stance toward spidering was established.

I agree that it would be an extremely valuable course of action to seed a series of torrents, since a single torrent wouldn't work; it would have to be replaced every time a new paper was uploaded, fragmenting the swarm enough to render it useless. Also, they could surely use Fastly and permit spidering.

Re: ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs

#90

Post by chrisseaton »

murkt wrote: post #63
jph00 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> Someone has to find a suitable reviewer, which can be a bit time-consuming task [1], write to reviewers, just do all the coordination.

All done by volunteers!

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