A letter to the Editorial Board, Journal of Algorithms (2003) [pdf]

This year, I decided to pony up for ACM lifetime dues with digital library access. That's $3960, or 20 years worth of dues at this year's rate. I think that's a fair cost for a professional in industry.

IEEE, on the other hand, is an annoyance. Annual dues are $198 this year too, which essentially gets you a print subscription to Spectrum magazine (free online; bloated with ads) and Google-hosted e-mail account (no ads; internally spammed by IEEE), but that's effectively it. With a basic 3 papers/mo digital subscription (which should be included at no additional cost as part of annual dues IMHO), that'll set me back $425.40 this year alone...over 2x ACM annual dues for a tease of relevant content. Despite having spent the past few years wait until the end of January to internally deliberate whether I should stay legit and renew or seek alternative means, I nevertheless end up paying the piper for another year.

For all intents and purposes, Elsevier can suck it. About 2 years ago, a few of their business development guys came to my division to pitch a new service. There's only one other guy (PhD candidate at the time) in my division who follows the literature, but he wasn't there for the pitch. That gave me free reign to take up the entire Q&A session pointing out broken or deficient aspects and subtly jab at the irrelevance of their product to our mission. In the end, the bosses didn't bite on the product...they would have taken us to the cleaners otherwise.

Thanks!

Naturally I was curious about the big looming question "ok, so what is the cost/page for the new ACM TALG, then"? I surfed the journal's pages (at http://talg.acm.org/index.cfm) for a while but was unable to come up with an answer.

A subcription to just the journal is $360, I assume that's yearly. But the number of issues per year seems to vary, and I failed completely to figure out the page count for a typical issue. I hope it's cheaper than before! :)

Also, I love that the journal has submission rules that limit authors to max one paper regarding P != NP per 24 months:

No author may submit more than one paper to J. ACM, ACM Trans. on Algorithms, ACM Trans. on Computation Theory, or SIAM J. on Computing in any 24 month period, purporting to resolve the P versus NP question or related long-standing questions in complexity theory, except by invitation of the Editor-in-Chief.

I wonder if such limitations are needed/common in other fields, or if it's more of an in-joke. Also, there's a typo in Knuth's address on the Editors page. :)