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>the executive salaries are $0 as far as I know I have no way of verifying this, but clearly the money is going somewhere and it's not publishing. >It's basic

>the executive salaries are $0 as far as I know I have no way of verifying this, but clearly the money is going somewhere and it's not publishing. >It's basically how publishing would work if academics take control away from commercial publishers arxiv is closer to how publishing would or should work if academics were entirely in charge. Publishing only entails putting a pdf up. All the peer review process is orthogonal which is done for free by everyone involved. >Authors generally have the option to keep the copyright of the papers when publishing for ACM, and at least host the papers on their homepages. You do not retain the copyright, and the only permission you get is to share it for classroom use with some other constraints. Authors posting them on their university websites is a grey area that is likely non compliant but it would be really bad PR for ACM to go after such instances. More recently, ACM has started allowing authors to pay some exorbitant fee to make the paper open access. >This is a good thing that they dominate CS/EE as they have more reasonable access costs Actually, there isn't really a big difference between the access costs. For most of the world, it's infinite. It doesn't matter if Elsevier is trying to charge $100 for a paper and ACM is trying to charge $30. Or what deals they make with libraries. It's all infinite for anyone not affiliated with a university in a western country. >It's not completely free because there are real costs to publishing The amortized cost of putting a pdf on the internet is close to 0. This is already true with arxiv. And even if you do not want to use arxiv, a static website with s3 or the new cloudflare equivalent will cost pennies per pdf.

lazyjeff 5y ago
Sorry for a back-and-forth replies, but I don't want readers to be misled: > You do not retain the copyright, and the only permission you get is to share it for classroom use with some other constraints. Authors posting them on their university websites is a grey area that is likely non compliant but it would be really bad PR for ACM to go after such instances. See https://authors.acm.org/author-services/author-rights https://authors.acm.org/author-services/author-rights the options that authors have, including "Authors who prefer to retain copyright of their work can sign an exclusive licensing agreement, which gives ACM the right but not the obligation to defend the work against improper use by third parties." And the copyright block in one of my papers as an example: https://jeffhuang.com/papers/SelfE_CHI21.pdf https://jeffhuang.com/papers/SelfE_CHI21.pdf which says "© 2021 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM." (there are no fees to choosing this option, by the way) >> the executive salaries are $0 as far as I know > I have no way of verifying this, but clearly the money is going somewhere and it's not publishing. Here's an article by Vert Cerf saying that all ACM positions are voluntary and paid $0/year, if you want to believe him: https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2013/5/163764-acm-presidents-salary-increased-by-300/fulltext https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2013/5/163764-acm-presidents-... >> It's not completely free because there are real costs to publishing > The amortized cost of putting a pdf on the internet is close to 0. Yes and posting a jpeg on the internet is close to 0, yet AirBnB still charges a fee for their service. The publishing process (including coordinating peer review and development of multiple web apps) has more costs than hosting a pdf. You're welcome to review the non-profit filings for ACM/IEEE if you're genuinely interested in what the money is spent on. And you're always able to upload your pdf to arXiv regardless of what you do with ACM, "an example of a site ACM authors may post all versions of their work to, with the exception of the final published "Version of Record", is ArXiv" [https://www.acm.org/publications/openaccess https://www.acm.org/publications/openaccess]
- bubblethink 5y ago
  From the website you linked: >Authors who wish to retain all rights to their work can choose ACM's author-pays option, which allows for perpetual open access through the ACM Digital Library So, this requires the author, and by extension, taxpayers in most cases, to pay a couple of thousand to ACM to put a pdf online. How does this make sense ? >And the copyright block in one of my papers as an example: https://jeffhuang.com/papers/SelfE_CHI21.pdf https://jeffhuang.com/papers/SelfE_CHI21.pdf which says "© 2021 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM." (there are no fees to choosing this option, by the way) This is the grey area I am talking about. You licensed the rights exclusively to ACM, in perpetuity. In fact, your own publication of the pdf may also be non-compliant, but nobody has sued you as that would be political suicide. Whether you satisfy the personal and classroom requirement is not clear. It is also not clear what agreement you signed with ACM. And you certainly cannot publish this under a different license because >Please note that the right to assign a CC-BY license to the published Version of Record of the Work requires either the payment of an APC or an affiliation with an institution that participates in the ACM Open program >Including coordinating peer review and development of multiple web apps) has more costs than hosting a pdf And this is the crux of the issue. Nobody is compensated for this in the review cycle. So why is the cost of the final product so astronomical ? >Yes and posting a jpeg on the internet is close to 0, yet AirBnB still charges a fee for their service. I don't get this argument. AirBnB has a different product. That's why I mentioned the cost of AWS S3 and R2, which is literally what you would pay to host things.
  - mbarbar 5y ago
    > So, this requires the author, and by extension, taxpayers in most cases, to pay a couple of thousand to ACM to put a pdf online. How does this make sense ? Tangential, though at a recent SIGPLAN conference, the cost to authors to licence under CC-BY was listed at 400USD. In place was "The article processing charge (APC) is to be paid anyway for all PACMPL articles, and ACM SIGPLAN covers it if you cannot afford it. Your paper will be open access no matter which kind of publishing-rights agreement you choose.". That said, from what I can tell, most of the main programming languages conferences have far better systems and communities in place than many other fields (a lot of open access, double blind reviews, etc.).

lazyjeff 5y ago

Sorry for a back-and-forth replies, but I don't want readers to be misled: > You do not retain the copyright, and the only permission you get is to share it for classroom use with some other constraints. Authors posting them on their university websites is a grey area that is likely non compliant but it would be really bad PR for ACM to go after such instances. See https://authors.acm.org/author-services/author-rights https://authors.acm.org/author-services/author-rights the options that authors have, including "Authors who prefer to retain copyright of their work can sign an exclusive licensing agreement, which gives ACM the right but not the obligation to defend the work against improper use by third parties." And the copyright block in one of my papers as an example: https://jeffhuang.com/papers/SelfE_CHI21.pdf https://jeffhuang.com/papers/SelfE_CHI21.pdf which says "© 2021 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM." (there are no fees to choosing this option, by the way) >> the executive salaries are $0 as far as I know > I have no way of verifying this, but clearly the money is going somewhere and it's not publishing. Here's an article by Vert Cerf saying that all ACM positions are voluntary and paid $0/year, if you want to believe him: https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2013/5/163764-acm-presidents-salary-increased-by-300/fulltext https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2013/5/163764-acm-presidents-... >> It's not completely free because there are real costs to publishing > The amortized cost of putting a pdf on the internet is close to 0. Yes and posting a jpeg on the internet is close to 0, yet AirBnB still charges a fee for their service. The publishing process (including coordinating peer review and development of multiple web apps) has more costs than hosting a pdf. You're welcome to review the non-profit filings for ACM/IEEE if you're genuinely interested in what the money is spent on. And you're always able to upload your pdf to arXiv regardless of what you do with ACM, "an example of a site ACM authors may post all versions of their work to, with the exception of the final published "Version of Record", is ArXiv" [https://www.acm.org/publications/openaccess https://www.acm.org/publications/openaccess]

bubblethink 5y ago
From the website you linked: >Authors who wish to retain all rights to their work can choose ACM's author-pays option, which allows for perpetual open access through the ACM Digital Library So, this requires the author, and by extension, taxpayers in most cases, to pay a couple of thousand to ACM to put a pdf online. How does this make sense ? >And the copyright block in one of my papers as an example: https://jeffhuang.com/papers/SelfE_CHI21.pdf https://jeffhuang.com/papers/SelfE_CHI21.pdf which says "© 2021 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM." (there are no fees to choosing this option, by the way) This is the grey area I am talking about. You licensed the rights exclusively to ACM, in perpetuity. In fact, your own publication of the pdf may also be non-compliant, but nobody has sued you as that would be political suicide. Whether you satisfy the personal and classroom requirement is not clear. It is also not clear what agreement you signed with ACM. And you certainly cannot publish this under a different license because >Please note that the right to assign a CC-BY license to the published Version of Record of the Work requires either the payment of an APC or an affiliation with an institution that participates in the ACM Open program >Including coordinating peer review and development of multiple web apps) has more costs than hosting a pdf And this is the crux of the issue. Nobody is compensated for this in the review cycle. So why is the cost of the final product so astronomical ? >Yes and posting a jpeg on the internet is close to 0, yet AirBnB still charges a fee for their service. I don't get this argument. AirBnB has a different product. That's why I mentioned the cost of AWS S3 and R2, which is literally what you would pay to host things.
- mbarbar 5y ago
  > So, this requires the author, and by extension, taxpayers in most cases, to pay a couple of thousand to ACM to put a pdf online. How does this make sense ? Tangential, though at a recent SIGPLAN conference, the cost to authors to licence under CC-BY was listed at 400USD. In place was "The article processing charge (APC) is to be paid anyway for all PACMPL articles, and ACM SIGPLAN covers it if you cannot afford it. Your paper will be open access no matter which kind of publishing-rights agreement you choose.". That said, from what I can tell, most of the main programming languages conferences have far better systems and communities in place than many other fields (a lot of open access, double blind reviews, etc.).