9 ms·

ACM costs vs. arxiv.org costs

240 points by luu 7y ago

drallison 7y ago
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.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  You can host a peer-reviewed selection of papers as an "Overlay" over an open-access archive such as arxiv.org, at trivial cost. Closed-access journals don't even fund their peer-reviewers generally, so it's not like the "overlay" journal would be offering a worse deal from that POV.
  - n4r9 7y ago
    Indeed, it costs very little to run a good quality journal and there's a growing network of them owned and managed by the scholarly community itself: https://freejournals.org/ https://freejournals.org/
- jph00 7y ago
  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...)
  - denzil_correa 7y ago
    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.
    - Someone 7y ago
      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 has a copy and b) flying there to photograph it) and that’s a cost PLOS won’t ever have.
      - denzil_correa 7y ago
        > 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-launched/ https://gowers.wordpress.com/2016/03/01/discrete-analysis-la... [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/non-profit_organizations https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/non-profit_organizations
    - lultimouomo 7y ago
      It's quite clear how you can rationalize it: * to advance your career you need to publish in certain specific journals * 5 grand is a reasonable amount of money to advance your career therefore: * it is reasonable to pay 5 grands to publish on such a journal
  - murkt 7y ago
    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 https://www.prophy.science/referee-finder
    - denzil_correa 7y ago
      > Someone has to find a suitable reviewer, which can be a bit time-consuming task [1], write to reviewers, just do all the coordination. This is done by the Program Chairs of the conference who are professors at universities. ACM doesn't do or pay anything for it.
    - chrisseaton 7y ago
      > 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!
- denzil_correa 7y ago
  > 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 I have been a reviewer of many ACM, Elsevier etc. conferences. The reviewers, editors don't get any money for their service. Regardless, "professional management" is not a sufficient argument for 33x / 190x the price difference . IEEE annual spend $92M in people costs and I doubt a single $ of it goes to any of these peer reviews or editors.
  - b215826 7y ago
    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 do a bit of copy editing that goes beyond mere spell checks before publishing the articles. Although copy editing and post-production is generally outsourced, it is still expensive. All this adds to the cost.
    - ringzero 7y ago
      > 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?
      - b215826 7y ago
        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.
    - Certhas 7y ago
- reggieband 7y ago
  > surprise surprise--different costs The surprise is NOT that the costs are different. The surprise is the order of magnitude of the difference. The surprise is also the absolute value of the cost of IEEE given it's apparent activity. I have no idea if the massive spending on IEEE is reasonable given I have no insight into their org. I do agree the size of the costs as associated with the activities is suspicious.
  - jessriedel 7y ago
    It's fine to think that the IEEE cost is too high for the value provided, but there's no reason to measure it with respect to a baseline defined by the arXiv. The arXiv is literally just an automated system pushing bits around (plus some unpaid volunteers who do light moderating). Likewise, I might think the person employed at the post office gets paid too much relative to the value they provide, but it would be silly to compare their salary cost to the maintenance cost of a blue steel Post Office box on the corner. ("Their health insurance alone costs 1000x the annual price of blue paint!")
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  > 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.
  - tensor 7y ago
    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.
    - chrisseaton 7y ago
      > someone has to solicit reviewers and manage the review process Lol that’s done by volunteer community members as well. It literally is free to the ACM (but the people are paid to do it by their institutions as part of their jobs.)
      - mturmon 7y ago
        Your lol is misinformed. ACM and IEEE produce and print actual dead-tree journals. This means selecting a fixed number of articles which are consistently formatted by an editorial process. Additionally, [edited to qualify: some but not all] IEEE Associate Editors are paid positions. Arxiv is not doing this. We can argue/debate about what is the value-add (and precise workflow difference) of the IEEE editorial process vs. arxiv, but there is a difference. Like the comment you responded to, I'm not defending the precise differential. I'm a past IEEE member (and author, and reviewer) and found their membership fees excessive.
        chrisseaton 7y ago
        > Your lol is misinformed. In every ACM review committee I’ve participated in, it’s just volunteer members of the community emailing other other and using open source software to coordinate reviews.
        7y ago
- thawaway1837 7y ago
  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.
dvanduzer 7y ago
(arxiv.org is not archive.org if someone wants to fix the title. both are absurd creations that can't possibly exist, though.)
- AceJohnny2 7y ago
  > both are absurd creations that can't possibly exist, though. How so?
  - dhosek 7y ago
    irony
  - bordercases 7y ago
    It was an endearing comment.
  - dvanduzer 7y ago
    I intended that as a reference to an XKCD strip[0]. Folks often talk about public goods like scientific research, as if the "real stuff" couldn't possibly happen without private investment. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ [0] https://xkcd.com/2102/ https://xkcd.com/2102/
- dang 7y ago
  Fixed. Thanks!
PaulHoule 7y ago
The big difference is that the acm spends a few million of that on politicians to keep it that way, but Arxiv doesn't have the money to do that.
zozbot234 7y ago
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.
- bordercases 7y ago
  Wayback Machine crawls files as well as pages.
- kragen 7y ago
  ArXiv has historically been extremely hostile to crawlers, which is one of the reasons for its low costs.
  - Dylan16807 7y ago
    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.
    - kragen 7y ago
      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.
getpolarized 7y ago
What are the costs here... 25M downloads per month doesn't seem like it should cost $100k per month. Must be total archive size I imagine?
- zachruss92 7y ago
  This isn't insanely high given its traffic and that it's attached to an educational (not for profit) institution. They need developers, infrastructure, support, people to process the papers, etc...
jph00 7y ago
I wrote this tweet. Wasn't sure anyone would read it - glad it's got noticed, because I do think it's an important issue! I'd love to know where that money at IEEE and ACM is going. The annual reports don't make it at all clear, unfortunately. Obviously, there are for-profit publishers where the money is simply going to huge profit margins. But that's not the case for professional societies. One thing I noticed when I had to sign up to ACM for a conference a few years ago was that I got harangued by sales-people from ACM for months afterwards, trying to get me on a call to have me buy more expensive memberships. It wasn't an automated system - it was an actual person, trying to get me onto an actual phone call with them. It occurred to me at the time that that must be very expensive, yet it's still a profitable thing for them to do - so there's clearly a lot of money changing hands... I don't think this is a good sign. Perhaps the professional societies can openly publish a full breakdown of what they're spending money on?
- cs702 7y ago
  Thank you for tweeting this. I'm making my way through the IEEE annual report to which you linked[a], and am dumbfounded too. Not only does the IEEE spend $193.4M/year operating "periodicals and media," they also spend $103.5M/year on "membership and public imperatives" (!?) and $38.5M/year on "standards" (!?). Note that these figures do not include the amounts spent on conferences, which are at least tangible. Moreover, it looks like the organization has $523.8M in investments at fair value (p. 43) -- an endowment greater than that of the vast majority of US colleges and universities. Am I imagining things, or does the IEEE look a lot like "a small hedge fund attached to a professional organization?" To put that last figure in perspective, if income and gains from the IEEE's investment portfolio are, say, at least 5%/year, they could fund all of arXiv.org's annual expenses 20 times over in perpetuity without dipping into capital. Something smells rotten indeed. [a] https://www.ieee.org/content/dam/ieee-org/ieee/web/org/corporate-communications/annual-report/2018-ieee-annual-report-final.pdf https://www.ieee.org/content/dam/ieee-org/ieee/web/org/corpo...
  - jph00 7y ago
    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 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 & Profession".
Causality1 7y ago
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.
- DoofusOfDeath 7y ago
  > Taking someone's money to fund research and then not giving them access to that research is theft. That seems like hyperbole to me. I think it falls more into the category of "inequitable exchange" or "bad deal".
- throwawayjava 7y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act seems way more important than fixing publishing...
elehack 7y ago
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 archive publications in more future-proof formats. There are also the ongoing costs of creating and indexing metadata (ACM tracks more metadata than arXiv, including resolved citations), preservation (ACM buys failsafe perpetual access services from Portico, arXiv has mirrors at other university libraries). Should it cost $10.9M? I am not sure. Does it cost a lot more than what arXiv does? Yes. For a costing exercise: the service ACM buys from Portico is archival and republication. If ACM goes insolvent, Portico flips on their archive and the content remains available. How would you price this service, knowing that when it is actually needed, it's because your customer can no longer pay bills, and you now need to take up their hosting (and all related costs) for approximately forever with no further revenue? I think a network of university libraries would be a more cost-effective way to provide this service, but it's the kind of thing that people working on publication and archival professionally think about, and that factors into the cost of professional archival-level publication. (I cannot speak to IEEE.)
- jph00 7y ago
  Thank you for the correction. IEEE's $193m is where we should focus our attention, when it comes to this expense line.
  - elehack 7y ago
    I agree. I have no idea what IEEE is doing that costs that much. And while I don't take as hard a line against them as I do against Elsevier, I have never published with them and don't currently have any plans to change that.
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  > 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 from authors and uploading it to a file server?
Rochus 7y ago
Isn't this a typical case of Parkinson's law? See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law (didn't find a free version of the book unfortunately). There is even a fitting example in the book where Parkinson describes how the administration of the British Navy became bigger and bigger although there were fewer and fewer ships to manage. In the present case, one would have to assume analogously that with the introduction of the Internet and the advancing automation, considerable costs were eliminated. So the question is: have ACM and the other mentioned organizations already reached the tertiary and last stage of INJELITITIS?
- cowsandmilk 7y ago
  > have ACM and the other mentioned organizations already reached the tertiary and last stage of INJELITITIS? Frankly, ACM membership and publication is a good deal compared to many other societies. For $200 annual dues, you get unlimited access to all journals. Contrast to the American Chemical Society. For $175, you get: 1) Access to 50 articles for 48 hours 2) The right to purchase access to additional articles at $12 a pop for 48 hour access. You want to look at the article again after 48 hours? Pay up again. [0] https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/membership/member-benefits/publications-discounts.html https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/membership/member-benefit...
  - Rochus 7y ago
    Well, that was not the argument. I agree, there are much greedier organizations around. However, this does not answer the question why the operation of these organisations is so expensive compared to their services. Parkinson has a good explanation though ;-)
liamdiprose 7y ago
If its hosting costs the ACM is worried about, they could offer torrents as a free download option to lighten the load.
- covertlibrarian 7y ago
  I imagine the vast majority of the digital library is included here: http://libgen.is/scimag/repository_torrent/ 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/ http://gen.lib.rus.ec/dbdumps/ provide an index.
alynn 7y ago
One great thing about a $99/year ACM membership is that it includes full access to the O’Reilly service formerly known as Safari Books, normally $499/year. I have no idea what the volume pricing on Safari subscriptions is, so can only say there’s a possibility that ACM article sales subsidize Safari books; I do know that, as an individual who has to learn new things and look old things up constantly, the inclusion of O’Reilly/Safari makes an individual ACM subscription a fantastic deal. Additionally, having seen someone organize an academic conference once, I do know that IEEE provides a conference with things like bank accounts, insurance, and purchasing departments that can meet the creditworthiness requirements of major hotels. It also ends up covering the shortfall if the conference winds up losing money. I’m all for improving efficiencies where possible, and there are definitely some problems with these organizations, don’t get me wrong; but I did want to emphasize that both organizations are definitely providing real value to parts of the computing community. Disclaimer: I haven’t read the link as twitter is (intentionally) inaccessible from my machine.
- exikyut 7y ago
  I'm curious why twitter is inaccessible from your machine.
  - Mathnerd314 7y ago
    From "intentionally" I would guess a social network DNS blocklist that he self-configured, although it could also be a workplace policy.
    - andrew_n 7y ago
      Yeah, self-configured DNS blocklist. Some of the reasons I’m not a fan of twitter apply to hacker news as well; for example, both can be distracting and contribute to procrastination. Compared to hacker news, my main issues with twitter are a much lower signal-to-noise ratio, lack of prioritization over time windows—if I take a day/week/month away from hacker news, it’s easy to catch up on the top things I missed at https://hn.algolia.com https://hn.algolia.com —lack of depth in content, and pervasive tracking across other sites including through t.co.
fock 7y ago
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...
- thanatropism 7y ago
  \renewcommand{\d}{\mathrm d}
  - mkl 7y ago
    I prefer \newcommand{\intd}{\,\mathrm{d}} to separate it a little.
- majos 7y ago
  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.
musicale 7y ago
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 registration fees, which are outrageous because of what the venues usually charge and get away with. Usenix seems (to me at least) to be better run and had open access policies years before ACM. But the IEEE is largely a cesspool as well, charging absurd fees for digital library access, and sponsoring a number of spamferences.
- musicale 7y ago
  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.
redis_mlc 7y ago
For those who are trying to follow the money, often organizations like these have expensive old-school benefits like defined-benefit pension plans.
- jph00 7y ago
  Following the money is an excellent plan! I haven't heard anything about defined-benefit pension plans, or their use in professional societies. Could you say a bit more? Or provide a link to learn more?
dependenttypes 7y ago
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.
- aneutron 7y ago
  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.
EamonnMR 7y ago
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.

240 points by luu 7y ago

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.

zozbot234 7y ago
You can host a peer-reviewed selection of papers as an "Overlay" over an open-access archive such as arxiv.org, at trivial cost. Closed-access journals don't even fund their peer-reviewers generally, so it's not like the "overlay" journal would be offering a worse deal from that POV.
- n4r9 7y ago
  Indeed, it costs very little to run a good quality journal and there's a growing network of them owned and managed by the scholarly community itself: https://freejournals.org/ https://freejournals.org/
jph00 7y ago
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...)
- denzil_correa 7y ago
  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.
  - Someone 7y ago
    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 has a copy and b) flying there to photograph it) and that’s a cost PLOS won’t ever have.
    - denzil_correa 7y ago
      > 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-launched/ https://gowers.wordpress.com/2016/03/01/discrete-analysis-la... [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/non-profit_organizations https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/non-profit_organizations
  - lultimouomo 7y ago
    It's quite clear how you can rationalize it: * to advance your career you need to publish in certain specific journals * 5 grand is a reasonable amount of money to advance your career therefore: * it is reasonable to pay 5 grands to publish on such a journal
- murkt 7y ago
  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 https://www.prophy.science/referee-finder
  - denzil_correa 7y ago
    > Someone has to find a suitable reviewer, which can be a bit time-consuming task [1], write to reviewers, just do all the coordination. This is done by the Program Chairs of the conference who are professors at universities. ACM doesn't do or pay anything for it.
  - chrisseaton 7y ago
    > 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!
denzil_correa 7y ago
> 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 I have been a reviewer of many ACM, Elsevier etc. conferences. The reviewers, editors don't get any money for their service. Regardless, "professional management" is not a sufficient argument for 33x / 190x the price difference . IEEE annual spend $92M in people costs and I doubt a single $ of it goes to any of these peer reviews or editors.
- b215826 7y ago
  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 do a bit of copy editing that goes beyond mere spell checks before publishing the articles. Although copy editing and post-production is generally outsourced, it is still expensive. All this adds to the cost.
  - ringzero 7y ago
    > 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?
    - b215826 7y ago
      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.
  - Certhas 7y ago
reggieband 7y ago
> surprise surprise--different costs The surprise is NOT that the costs are different. The surprise is the order of magnitude of the difference. The surprise is also the absolute value of the cost of IEEE given it's apparent activity. I have no idea if the massive spending on IEEE is reasonable given I have no insight into their org. I do agree the size of the costs as associated with the activities is suspicious.
- jessriedel 7y ago
  It's fine to think that the IEEE cost is too high for the value provided, but there's no reason to measure it with respect to a baseline defined by the arXiv. The arXiv is literally just an automated system pushing bits around (plus some unpaid volunteers who do light moderating). Likewise, I might think the person employed at the post office gets paid too much relative to the value they provide, but it would be silly to compare their salary cost to the maintenance cost of a blue steel Post Office box on the corner. ("Their health insurance alone costs 1000x the annual price of blue paint!")
chrisseaton 7y ago
> 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.
- tensor 7y ago
  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.
  - chrisseaton 7y ago
    > someone has to solicit reviewers and manage the review process Lol that’s done by volunteer community members as well. It literally is free to the ACM (but the people are paid to do it by their institutions as part of their jobs.)
    - mturmon 7y ago
      Your lol is misinformed. ACM and IEEE produce and print actual dead-tree journals. This means selecting a fixed number of articles which are consistently formatted by an editorial process. Additionally, [edited to qualify: some but not all] IEEE Associate Editors are paid positions. Arxiv is not doing this. We can argue/debate about what is the value-add (and precise workflow difference) of the IEEE editorial process vs. arxiv, but there is a difference. Like the comment you responded to, I'm not defending the precise differential. I'm a past IEEE member (and author, and reviewer) and found their membership fees excessive.
      - chrisseaton 7y ago
        > Your lol is misinformed. In every ACM review committee I’ve participated in, it’s just volunteer members of the community emailing other other and using open source software to coordinate reviews.
      - 7y ago
thawaway1837 7y ago
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.

dvanduzer 7y ago

(arxiv.org is not archive.org if someone wants to fix the title. both are absurd creations that can't possibly exist, though.)

AceJohnny2 7y ago
> both are absurd creations that can't possibly exist, though. How so?
- dhosek 7y ago
  irony
- bordercases 7y ago
  It was an endearing comment.
- dvanduzer 7y ago
  I intended that as a reference to an XKCD strip[0]. Folks often talk about public goods like scientific research, as if the "real stuff" couldn't possibly happen without private investment. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ [0] https://xkcd.com/2102/ https://xkcd.com/2102/
dang 7y ago
Fixed. Thanks!

PaulHoule 7y ago

The big difference is that the acm spends a few million of that on politicians to keep it that way, but Arxiv doesn't have the money to do that.

zozbot234 7y ago

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.

bordercases 7y ago
Wayback Machine crawls files as well as pages.
kragen 7y ago
ArXiv has historically been extremely hostile to crawlers, which is one of the reasons for its low costs.
- Dylan16807 7y ago
  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.
  - kragen 7y ago
    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.

getpolarized 7y ago

What are the costs here... 25M downloads per month doesn't seem like it should cost $100k per month. Must be total archive size I imagine?

zachruss92 7y ago
This isn't insanely high given its traffic and that it's attached to an educational (not for profit) institution. They need developers, infrastructure, support, people to process the papers, etc...

jph00 7y ago

I wrote this tweet. Wasn't sure anyone would read it - glad it's got noticed, because I do think it's an important issue! I'd love to know where that money at IEEE and ACM is going. The annual reports don't make it at all clear, unfortunately. Obviously, there are for-profit publishers where the money is simply going to huge profit margins. But that's not the case for professional societies. One thing I noticed when I had to sign up to ACM for a conference a few years ago was that I got harangued by sales-people from ACM for months afterwards, trying to get me on a call to have me buy more expensive memberships. It wasn't an automated system - it was an actual person, trying to get me onto an actual phone call with them. It occurred to me at the time that that must be very expensive, yet it's still a profitable thing for them to do - so there's clearly a lot of money changing hands... I don't think this is a good sign. Perhaps the professional societies can openly publish a full breakdown of what they're spending money on?

cs702 7y ago
Thank you for tweeting this. I'm making my way through the IEEE annual report to which you linked[a], and am dumbfounded too. Not only does the IEEE spend $193.4M/year operating "periodicals and media," they also spend $103.5M/year on "membership and public imperatives" (!?) and $38.5M/year on "standards" (!?). Note that these figures do not include the amounts spent on conferences, which are at least tangible. Moreover, it looks like the organization has $523.8M in investments at fair value (p. 43) -- an endowment greater than that of the vast majority of US colleges and universities. Am I imagining things, or does the IEEE look a lot like "a small hedge fund attached to a professional organization?" To put that last figure in perspective, if income and gains from the IEEE's investment portfolio are, say, at least 5%/year, they could fund all of arXiv.org's annual expenses 20 times over in perpetuity without dipping into capital. Something smells rotten indeed. [a] https://www.ieee.org/content/dam/ieee-org/ieee/web/org/corporate-communications/annual-report/2018-ieee-annual-report-final.pdf https://www.ieee.org/content/dam/ieee-org/ieee/web/org/corpo...
- jph00 7y ago
  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 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 & Profession".

Causality1 7y ago

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.

DoofusOfDeath 7y ago
> Taking someone's money to fund research and then not giving them access to that research is theft. That seems like hyperbole to me. I think it falls more into the category of "inequitable exchange" or "bad deal".
throwawayjava 7y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act seems way more important than fixing publishing...

elehack 7y ago

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 archive publications in more future-proof formats. There are also the ongoing costs of creating and indexing metadata (ACM tracks more metadata than arXiv, including resolved citations), preservation (ACM buys failsafe perpetual access services from Portico, arXiv has mirrors at other university libraries). Should it cost $10.9M? I am not sure. Does it cost a lot more than what arXiv does? Yes. For a costing exercise: the service ACM buys from Portico is archival and republication. If ACM goes insolvent, Portico flips on their archive and the content remains available. How would you price this service, knowing that when it is actually needed, it's because your customer can no longer pay bills, and you now need to take up their hosting (and all related costs) for approximately forever with no further revenue? I think a network of university libraries would be a more cost-effective way to provide this service, but it's the kind of thing that people working on publication and archival professionally think about, and that factors into the cost of professional archival-level publication. (I cannot speak to IEEE.)

jph00 7y ago
Thank you for the correction. IEEE's $193m is where we should focus our attention, when it comes to this expense line.
- elehack 7y ago
  I agree. I have no idea what IEEE is doing that costs that much. And while I don't take as hard a line against them as I do against Elsevier, I have never published with them and don't currently have any plans to change that.
chrisseaton 7y ago
> 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 from authors and uploading it to a file server?

Rochus 7y ago

Isn't this a typical case of Parkinson's law? See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law (didn't find a free version of the book unfortunately). There is even a fitting example in the book where Parkinson describes how the administration of the British Navy became bigger and bigger although there were fewer and fewer ships to manage. In the present case, one would have to assume analogously that with the introduction of the Internet and the advancing automation, considerable costs were eliminated. So the question is: have ACM and the other mentioned organizations already reached the tertiary and last stage of INJELITITIS?

cowsandmilk 7y ago
> have ACM and the other mentioned organizations already reached the tertiary and last stage of INJELITITIS? Frankly, ACM membership and publication is a good deal compared to many other societies. For $200 annual dues, you get unlimited access to all journals. Contrast to the American Chemical Society. For $175, you get: 1) Access to 50 articles for 48 hours 2) The right to purchase access to additional articles at $12 a pop for 48 hour access. You want to look at the article again after 48 hours? Pay up again. [0] https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/membership/member-benefits/publications-discounts.html https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/membership/member-benefit...
- Rochus 7y ago
  Well, that was not the argument. I agree, there are much greedier organizations around. However, this does not answer the question why the operation of these organisations is so expensive compared to their services. Parkinson has a good explanation though ;-)

liamdiprose 7y ago

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

covertlibrarian 7y ago
I imagine the vast majority of the digital library is included here: http://libgen.is/scimag/repository_torrent/ 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/ http://gen.lib.rus.ec/dbdumps/ provide an index.

alynn 7y ago

One great thing about a $99/year ACM membership is that it includes full access to the O’Reilly service formerly known as Safari Books, normally $499/year. I have no idea what the volume pricing on Safari subscriptions is, so can only say there’s a possibility that ACM article sales subsidize Safari books; I do know that, as an individual who has to learn new things and look old things up constantly, the inclusion of O’Reilly/Safari makes an individual ACM subscription a fantastic deal. Additionally, having seen someone organize an academic conference once, I do know that IEEE provides a conference with things like bank accounts, insurance, and purchasing departments that can meet the creditworthiness requirements of major hotels. It also ends up covering the shortfall if the conference winds up losing money. I’m all for improving efficiencies where possible, and there are definitely some problems with these organizations, don’t get me wrong; but I did want to emphasize that both organizations are definitely providing real value to parts of the computing community. Disclaimer: I haven’t read the link as twitter is (intentionally) inaccessible from my machine.

exikyut 7y ago
I'm curious why twitter is inaccessible from your machine.
- Mathnerd314 7y ago
  From "intentionally" I would guess a social network DNS blocklist that he self-configured, although it could also be a workplace policy.
  - andrew_n 7y ago
    Yeah, self-configured DNS blocklist. Some of the reasons I’m not a fan of twitter apply to hacker news as well; for example, both can be distracting and contribute to procrastination. Compared to hacker news, my main issues with twitter are a much lower signal-to-noise ratio, lack of prioritization over time windows—if I take a day/week/month away from hacker news, it’s easy to catch up on the top things I missed at https://hn.algolia.com https://hn.algolia.com —lack of depth in content, and pervasive tracking across other sites including through t.co.

fock 7y ago

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...

thanatropism 7y ago
\renewcommand{\d}{\mathrm d}
- mkl 7y ago
  I prefer \newcommand{\intd}{\,\mathrm{d}} to separate it a little.
majos 7y ago
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.

musicale 7y ago

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 registration fees, which are outrageous because of what the venues usually charge and get away with. Usenix seems (to me at least) to be better run and had open access policies years before ACM. But the IEEE is largely a cesspool as well, charging absurd fees for digital library access, and sponsoring a number of spamferences.

musicale 7y ago
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.

redis_mlc 7y ago

For those who are trying to follow the money, often organizations like these have expensive old-school benefits like defined-benefit pension plans.

jph00 7y ago
Following the money is an excellent plan! I haven't heard anything about defined-benefit pension plans, or their use in professional societies. Could you say a bit more? Or provide a link to learn more?

dependenttypes 7y ago

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.

aneutron 7y ago
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.

EamonnMR 7y ago

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.