I don't have a huge issue with the ACM or even so much with IEEE. But have you ever submitted to or reviewed for Springer or Elsevier? It's an emasculating and thankless experience, and Springer and Elsevier go get to make huge profits off of everyone's free work. (haha, we just did it for exposure, right???)

I don't mean to imply that peer review is this shitty thing that we "have" to do. I review papers regularly and generally enjoy the process. But I think it's important to point out that no, we are not being paid for it, and actually typically the incentives in our jobs mean that peer review is a "thing we have to stuff in there somewhere", and certainly not a primary task.

> emasculating

that's an unfortunate word.

The ACM model is a good one, but it's not the norm in the other sciences. By which I mean that the main publisher of computer science work is actually a professional organization, which is community run and managed. But for people in fields where their professional organization and main publishers are different, it's not the same.

As computer scientists, we have it pretty good.

> I see it as a community.

Maybe you'd like to take a look at these members of the community, who show they care about the community by refusing to participate in journals for certain publishers: http://thecostofknowledge.com/ It even has a Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Cost_of_Knowl... And here's an example of one of them: https://www.scottaaronson.com/writings/journal.pdf

The whole reason they charge money is that not everyone who wants to read the papers has access. I work for government cancer lab. We subscribe to a lot of journals. Even so, I see these paywalls come up regularly because we can't subscribe to all journals.