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ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs

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Re: ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs

#91

Post by Dylan16807 »

kragen wrote: post #89
Dylan16807 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pr…

> They started in 1991, when a terabyte was an unimaginably huge quantity of data

The collection was a lot smaller then. The whole thing has fit on one hard drive for a long time. And as far as interpreting my post as criticism goes, apply it to the last ten years only.

> This is the context in which the arXiv's hostile stance toward spidering was established.

They should have reconsidered it at some point.

> series of torrents

Sure. A torrent for each 500MB chunk they already collate, or yearly, or both.

Re: ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs

#92

Post by Certhas »

Saigarich wrote: post #86
Certhas wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was quoting the number for submitted articles from Gowers blog, your number is accepted. Also, proofreading at publishers basically doesn't happen any more. And even if it would, it certainly doesn't account for the difference in price, not even remotely close.

You can call it bare bones, but as a scientist, it is very hard to see what value IEEE adds above this "bare bones" approach.

Re: ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs

#93

Post by b215826 »

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$+

That's an unfair comparison. Discrete Analysis is an arXiv-overlay journal, IEEE hosts its own articles. Plus, Discrete Analysis doesn't typeset or proofread the articles it publishes. Again, I'm not justifying the exorbitant prices that most journals charge to publish using an open access option, all I'm saying is that it's unfair to compare arXiv with an actual academic journal. A preprint repository is in no way equivalent to an academic journal.

Re: ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs

#94

Post by b215826 »

ringzero wrote: post #48
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…

> I suspect IEEE and ACM have much more complicated infrastructure to handle submission, peer review, production, etc., To the tune of a hundred million dollars? I can’t even remotely imagine how. If someone asked you to design a system to do all of those above things, would you actually come to the conclusion it’d cost a cool hundred mil yearly to operate?

I'd actually like to see a breakdown of IEEE costs. AFAIK, IEEE offers print-editions of several of its journals. I don't know who reads hard copies of journals these days, but I'm sure printing on actual physical paper would add to operating costs.

Re: ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs

#95

Post by aneutron »

dependenttypes wrote: post #88

Something seems weird. 25000000 downloads per month, lets assume that the average pdf size is 1MB, that would be only 776 GB of data uploaded per day, I do not think that this can justify the $1.3m/year figure.

For the sake of the argument, let's assume the following:

- If you factor all the man-hours required to keep the site up and running (ignoring the setup costs), then you'd have about one engineer for a whole year.

- If we go for a simple S3 based download and accompaniying infrastructure, it would be safe to assume that it would cost AT LEAST about $700k per year (AWS is not cheap).

I'd say it's about right.

Re: ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs

#96

Post by murkt »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #91
kragen wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pr…

> They started in 1991, when a terabyte was an unimaginably huge quantity of data The collection was a lot smaller then. The whole thing has fit on one hard drive for a long time. And as far as interpreting my post as criticism goes, apply it to the last ten years only. > This is the context in which the arXiv's hostile stance toward spidering was established. They should have reconsidered it at some point. > series…

arXiv has bulk dumps that anyone can S3. They aren't updated every day, not even every month, but still they have it. I used it myself.

Re: ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs

#97

Post by b215826 »

Certhas wrote: post #92
Saigarich wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was quoting the number for submitted articles from Gowers blog, your number is accepted. Also, proofreading at publishers basically doesn't happen any more. And even if it would, it certainly doesn't account for the difference in price, not even remotely close. You can call it bare bones, but as a scientist, it is very hard to see what value IEEE adds above this "bare bones" approach.

> Also, proofreading at publishers basically doesn't happen any more.

I'm sorry, but which publishers are you talking about here? I've published with several publishers in my field (physics) including APS, AIP, AAS, EPS, Springer, etc., and almost all of them do moderate to extensive copy editing, even for journals that aren't exactly high-impact.

> it certainly doesn't account for the difference in price, not even remotely close.

This is of course true, and I agree. But starting an argument against conventional journals by comparing their costs of operation with that of a preprint repository is disingenuous. And that is where I take issue.

Re: ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs

#98

Post by majos »

fock wrote: post #42

and except for simple formalities, Arxiv isn't reviewed, typeset or anything else, which a normal journal usually entails (and typesetting costs... hands up, who is doing all the integral d-s in mathrm...). And yet people cite Arxiv often blindly...

ACM and IEEE don’t review either, that’s all coordinated and done by volunteers, at least for every conference or journal I’ve reviewed for. Typesetting also seems irrelevant, I read a lot of Arxiv papers and have never found typesetting bad enough to matter.

There seem to be other things ACM/IEEE does like helping pay for conference stuff or somehow supporting student chapters. But the literal editorial role looks oversold.

Re: ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs

#99

Post by EamonnMR »

Can anyone speak to if ACM and/or IEEE memberships are worth it for a professional developer? I loved reading stuff like the History of Programming Languages papers back when I had student access in college.

Re: ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs

#100

Post by Dylan16807 »

murkt wrote: post #96
Dylan16807 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They started in 1991, when a terabyte was an unimaginably huge quantity of data The collection was a lot smaller then. The whole thing has fit on one hard drive for a long time. And as far as interpreting my post as criticism goes, apply it to the last ten years only. > This is the context in which the arXiv's hostile stance toward spidering was established. They should have reconsidered it at some point. > series…

arXiv has bulk dumps that anyone can S3. They aren't updated every day, not even every month, but still they have it. I used it myself.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22115894
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