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While it is the scientists who are writing the papers and editing them, the journals provide a valuable service as intermediaries between the scientists. Whethe
by KKKKkkkk1 11y ago
While it is the scientists who are writing the papers and editing them, the journals provide a valuable service as intermediaries between the scientists. Whether this service is best provided "for free" or for profit is another question. In some fields, the leading journals are already published by not-for-profit organizations such as the ACM, but I am not sure that they are doing a better job than Springer or Elsevier.
In a language that's understandable to the HN crowd, journals:scientists are as VCs:(founders + investors).
- mirimir 11y agoDoes ACM sell individual papers? If so, what's the price?
- jordigh 11y agoIt's about the same as everyone else: about 15 USD per paper, e.g. https://dl.acm.org/purchase.cfm?id=2756548&CFID=761526954&CFTOKEN=47826433 https://dl.acm.org/purchase.cfm?id=2756548&CFID=761526954&CF... They also have a somewhat restrictive licensing on their software: http://www.acm.org/publications/policies/softwarecrnotice http://www.acm.org/publications/policies/softwarecrnotice This part is kind of weird, as they have a noncommercial clause on their copyrighted algorithms, which makes them non-free. On a slightly different note, I was somewhat saddened by how the International Lisp Conference talks were recorded but unavailable because the ACM will not allow their publication.
- mirimir 11y agoHow the hell can that be "non-profit"? Where is the money going? Free conferences in Dubai?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- russell_h 11y agoThe ACM publishes annual reports with a high level breakdown of their finances. The most recent one is here: https://www.acm.org/binaries/content/assets/about/annual-reports-current-fy/acmfy15.pdf https://www.acm.org/binaries/content/assets/about/annual-rep... The finances are on pages 12 and 13. The short version: they're spending money on all the things you'd expect, but they seem to be slightly cash flow positive and have accrued around $100m in net assets.
- mirimir 11y agoWhat I'm wondering about is the economic justification for charging $15 per article copy. Other than "we can", I mean.
- ska 11y agoThe usual "economic justification" for such things is that people are paying it. In reality, very few people pay the individual article prices. The real market is in site licensing, as it were. The individual article prices are probably set to support the sales story on these institutional access licenses, not the other way around.
- russell_h 11y agoI think you can also get access to the ACM library via membership. When I was in college I paid for a student membership, I think its was $25/year or something generally reasonable. Probably a better value proposition than my actual CS degree, not that its a great point for comparison.
- mirimir 11y agoPaying $25 annually for membership would be entirely fair. That's far less than site license for even one journal. But what are criteria for student memberships?
- ska 11y agoThat's true. Many of these sorts of memberships are at least a few hundred dollars when you are no longer a student, so they add up pretty quickly (but maybe have tax credits).
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- karmelapple 11y agoMost definitely, here's a list of journals: http://dl.acm.org/pubs.cfm?CFID=591346815&CFTOKEN=85546644 http://dl.acm.org/pubs.cfm?CFID=591346815&CFTOKEN=85546644 And here's an article that, for instance, costs $15 to download: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=954342&CFID=591346815&CFTOKEN=85546644 http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=954342&CFID=591346815&CFTO...
- juliendorra 11y agoThe ACM is paywalled for the majority of the publications it manage. I found the ACM paywall to be one of the obstacle that limit access of the new wave of the code educators to older results in teaching programming: they are not in the academic sector and lack both knowledge of and access to this enormous amount of papers. So, in this case, the paywall keep a new generation naive, as they reinvent independently research that have been conducted decades earlier.
- pervycreeper 11y agoThey are extracting rents from research far beyond the value they add to it.
- adrianbd 11y agoWhat exactly is the valuable service they provide as intermediaries? Why couldn't all taxpayer-funded scientists just publish their (anyway voluntarily peer-reviewed) research on whatever free online platform?
- KKKKkkkk1 11y agoAs a taxpayer-funded scientist I publish all of my stuff on arXiv before submitting it to a journal, and it is 100% worthless for my career. If my research is not published in respected journals, other researchers will not bother looking at it, and justly so. Have you tried reading a paper selected at random on arXiv? You'll spend many long hours reading it only to end up realizing that it's garbage (unless you're lucky to realize this from reading the abstract).
- adrianbd 11y agoCompletely agree with your point. But the value here is brought by the reviewing process, which is (at least for CS as far as my knowledge goes) done voluntarily by other researchers, not by the journal itself. So the prestige of particular publishers could easily be shifted towards a free online platform as long as the same people continue to review the publications.